Dobroslav Stehlík

* 1919

  • "And suddenly, there were some five hundred of our gun carriages, they called them tractors, and the artillery stood there as well. And now, in the middle of the night - Germans. They wanted to fight their way to Germany. Those were not front soldiers but the SS. And at night, the dark was terrible, it was the most terrible night in all that war. Now, at night, you didn't know who you were talking to, and out of sudden, from all directions, you hear: Germans, Germans, Germans! And they were an unit of about five hundred men, all of them the SS. And when they [our soldiers] managed to catch them and took them prisoners, they said they didn't want to fight us, they only wanted to get to Germany."

  • "And by that Jaslo place, that's where the line was broken. And then we didn't stop, we went on to Liptovský Svatý Mikuláš. That's where the Germans resisted again, the fights were tough there, we fought for six weeks."

  • "Chalk Mountain, that's how they called it, and they mined chalk on the Chalk Mountain and took it to the cement plant where they made it into cement. And under that Chalk Mountain, there were huge ditches that they had dug up with bulldozers and there were such pieces of woods, like, beams, put across, and a lorry went there, then they got off and had to undress entirely, those Jews, and the Germans, they had machine guns placed on tables around those ditches and when they got off, they had to go on those woods and there they shot them. It was a terrible sight, impossible to stand it, and I ran away from that Zdolbunovo place, it was horrible what they did to those people, to the Jews."

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    Chotiměř, 08.10.2004

    (audio)
    duration: 01:41:14
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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When peace came, out of joy, we kept firing our guns in the air until the sky turned red.

Dobroslav Stehlík was born on the 18th of October in 1919 in Mirotín in Volhynia. The region where grew up belonged to Poland at that time, in 1939, he witnessed the Soviet occupation and in 1941, the Nazi occupation. During the German rule, the witness was conscripted to forced labour but he managed to escape and he was in hiding for some time. Along with his six brothers, he joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps in Rovno in 1944. After three months of army training in Sadagura in Romania, he joined the artillery and later, he fought at the Dukla Pass. After WWII, he acquired a smallholding that had belonged to expelled Germans