Vasil Coka

Vasil Coka was born in 1923 in the village of Dulovo in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. His story is a testament to what a young man is able to endure. After the Hungarian occupation of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, in 1939, Vasil Coka and one classmate from grammar school decided to flee to the Soviet Union. Upon crossing the border they were arrested by a Soviet border patrol. A Soviet tribunal sentenced Vasil Coka to three years of forced labor in Siberia for illegally crossing the border. He survived the three years in drastic conditions where death was an everyday companion; he was placed in gulags surrounding the town of Ukhta, which lies hundreds of kilometers to the north-east of Moscow. It was not uncommon for the temperature during winter to drop to minus forty degrees Celsius. In the summer the prisoners were harassed by ever-present malaria-infected mosquitoes. He was freed from the hell of the gulags by the formation of Czechoslovak army units in the USSR, where Vasil was drafted to in February 1943. He then took part in the famous battles of Kiev, Bila Cerkva, Dukla Pass, and Liptovský Mikuláš. As he himself says, although his friends were dying left and right, he himself was not afraid of death after what he had been through in the gulag. Shortly before the end of the war, on 6 May 1945, while liberating Bystřice pod Hostýnem in Czechoslovakia, he was hit and the bullet passed through his lungs and stomach; he spent the rest of the year recovering from this heavy injury. In 1947 he was released from active military service due to his ongoing health problems, and in 1949, after the Communists took over the country, he was deemed unreliable and demoted to the rank of Private. Sometime towards the end of the 1950s, Vasil Coka joined the Communist Party, but he was expelled in 1971 for disagreeing with the intervention of the Warsaw Pact armies. He now lives in Frýdek-Místek.

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