Fedor Durkot

* 1921

  • "The fighting was fierce. And there were those trees, beech trees mostly, they were quite huge – and they were plowed by gunfire. They were cut in half, almost no tree had a top. If you wouldn't be there, you would never... That was the reason I never had thought I would come back home alive. And I am here, alive and kicking. I am alive, I can work, I can walk without crutches. That was my greatest fear. That I would have to walk with this wooden leg and so on.”

  • “While I was in the army we weren't allowed to write to anyone, not even a simple postcard to our parents. And we had no postcards, so we wanted to send these messages written on birch bark. We would pull it off and write that we were alive, just that simple. But our families didn't get those letters. When I had been wounded and I went to hospital, they would let my family know that I was missing in action. So for a year, my parents, my mother had been given welfare, my parents thought I was dead and when I ended up in our army, at the end of the war, I came home, and there was this reunion I would never forget. I came back home and our house, the place where we had been living, was completely destroyed, there were just chimneys, jutting towards the sky. Not a single cup had been left, they had to eat tinned food, they had to use tins as cups to drink tea or coffee. It was just ugly.”

  • “It was just horrible, when they would capture a Russian and they would inquire who his commander was, what his unit was and so on, they were hard as a rock. When Hungarians and Germans got them, they would give them quite a beating. I thought they just couldn't survive something like that. But they didn't talk, they would never betray their people. They had been insisting that they would rather die than to surrender.”

  • “Russians had been advancing with katyuchas and there was this shell that exploded right next to our trench. There were three Hungarians with me – a sniper and those two assistants. They were all killed and my leg got hit. They took me to this school where a hospital was and the first thing they said was: 'We better cut off your leg and send you home'. But I didn't let them do that and I would recover. They said I got gangrene, as there was all this dust when the grenade had exploded, stating that I would get gangrene and lose my leg anyway. And I am still walking, as you can see, without a stick or anything, at the age of eighty.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Plzeň, 03.01.2001

    (audio)
    délka: 44:04
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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We had been writing messages on a birch bark, to tell them we were alive

Fedor Durkot was born in the town of Humenné, Eastern Slovakia, in 1921. He trained as a tailor in Mukachevo in the then Carpathian Rhutenia. In 1940 he was drafted to the Hungarian army. He had been serving in the former Yugoslavia, then he had been sent to the ‚eastern front‘. Fighting in the trenches for the Third Reich, he nearly lost his leg. After he had recovered, he had surrendered to the enemy; he had spent eight months in a Soviet POW camp, then he joined the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Brigade. On the side of the Allies he took part in the Battle of the Dukla Pass, fighting at Liptovský Mikuláš and at Žilina. After the war, he had been working for the United Nations (UNRRA), then he had moved to Pilsen, making his living as a tailor. He had been living in Pilsen while the interview had been recorded (2001).