Josef Jedlička

“And then the Mikolášek brothers, me, Bedřich Schneider – just the four of us I think – we took a train to Valašské Meziříčí. We got off at the station, and then this one gendarme checked us up, took our papers and said we had to go with him. And all the while the station crammed, there were two or three trains of German soldiers there. He took my papers and the papers of Václav Mikolášek and Stanislav Mikolášek. He didn’t take them from Bedřich Schneider’s. I think he was at the loo at the station. Well, and he led us out into the city. We lost sight of the German soldiers under a kind of tunnel by the station. Stanislav Mikolášek stopped the gendarme, pulled a pistol at him. He said: ‘We’re Czechs. We’re fighting the Germans. Let us go. We’re not thieves or anything.’ He was a firebrand German and his name was Trbůšek [it was Tvarůžek - ed.]. A fanatical Czech, but he joined the Germans. Well, and he reached for his pistol. And Václav shot him. And I told him: ‘Vašek, grab his pistol.’ But he said: ‘I can’t, man. He won’t let go.’ So we left him lying there and ran for it. And we ran along the river to the wood.”

“The chaps got drunk, and there was Lukoveček Manor there [in Loučka - ed.] where the Germans lived. There were some thirty or forty of them. They got buttered and decided to have at them. So we went, I went with them, with the liquored chaps. They stuck a grenade by the front door. Blew it up to smithereens. They rushed in, and the Germans stood at attention by teh beds in their undies. They had lots of weapons there, lots of panzerfausts, sub-machine guns, rifles. Three cartfuls. Someone from Kotáry lent a wagon and horse and a driver too. So we loaded up all of the Germans into the wagons. We put the panzerfausts down on the ground. And one of the blokes kept telling me: ‘Oh, that’s dangerous, that’s a panzerfaust,’ in German. I didn’t understand him. But that’s a fact all right. A panzerfaust, it has a kind of visor on it. You lift it up and lower it down and it fires. So I said: ‘Good.’ So we loaded them all up, the weapons on the ground and them standing on the wagon. And we set off at a dash to Černava. Murzin, Stěpanov were there, everyone. The whole brigade was there. Except halfway through the journey, and that was still a long way off from Murzin, a machine gun suddenly let rip at us from the forest. I leapt off the wagon and said: ‘Lie down, everyone! Down!’ So I showed them what I meant. They lay down. Except the driver crack his whip and the horse dashed off... And I was left standing there, I couldn’t keep up. So everyone drove off.”