The announcer in the radio had hardly finished informing us that the sky over the area was clear, when the bombs started falling
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Václav Bodlák was born on the 28th of March 1924 in Cukmantl - now called Pozorka, a part of the town of Dubí in Teplice District. His parents had a hen coop in the village of Suchá. In 1933, Václav Bodlák experienced the rise of German fanaticism, which culminated after the annexation of the Czech border regions in 1938. At the time, his parents sent Václav and his sister to stay with relatives in Prague. His father worked as a tailor in a trolley company. Because he refused to join the Sudeten German Party, he was fired from his job, and thus decided to move to Prague. Václav Bodák learned to be a waiter, graduating in 1939 and subsequently registering at the Employment Office. There he was assigned the job of mechanic in an aircraft factory in Prague, where he worked on the production of wings for the cargo planes Junkers 52. He was then transferred to Leipzig to the ATG Leipzig factory, which also produced aircraft. He experienced heavy bombing, surviving only by a miracle. He and four other colleagues escaped from their forced labour and returned to Prague. After the war he volunteered into the army. He was stationed at the Pravčická brána natural monument. He then returned to Teplice, he worked in his uncle’s pub in Cukmantl, later on Komáří hůrka Mountain. In Cukmantl he met his future wife. Václav Bodlák’s wife was from a mixed family - her father was Czech (a shoemaker), her mother German. The marriage gave two children.
