"I would kiss the Russians' hands how well they treated us in captivity." - "What did you eat?" - "We had soup three times a day and half a kilo of bread. I always thought that if there was a place for me to travel to, it would be Russia. Really! I thing their spirituality is better than that of any other nation. But in the present, I don't know. I'm not a politician but it's all going to shit."
"How did the people from the villages you had passed as a POW going to Brno treat you?" - "Terribly. We marched in files of six. I tried to be in the middle because it was aweful on the edges. They ripped off the prisoners' clothes; shot at them from behind the gates."
"Do you recall the first men from Hať being drafted to the Wehrmacht?" - "Yes, I do." - "Who went first from your family?" - "The first ones were my counsins. Konrád was born in 1922, Alfréd in 1924, Osvald in 1925. They were the first from my family. Then Gustav Bortlík, born 1922. Twelve of them were enlisted. And none of them had returned."
Erich Bortlík was born on 5 June 1928 in Hať in the Hlučín area. His father was a worker in a chemical plant in Ostrava while his mother stayed at home and looked after the children and a small farm. Following the annexation of the Hlučín region by the Third Reich in the fall of 1938, Erich witnessed the arrival of the German army. All of the men and older boys from his family were gradually drafted to the Wehrmacht in the course of WW II. None of them had returned. Erich’s father died at the Western Front while his brother went missing in the Soviet Union. In January 1945 Erich himself started his training. In April he was captured by the Red Army and deported him via Romania and the Black See to a POW camp in Russia, between Novorossiysk and Krasnodar. He worked there in a joiner’s workshop before release in December 1945 after which he returned home to Hať. From 1950 till 1953 he unterwent military service with the Auxilliary Technical Battalions. For all of his professional life he worked in chemical plants in Ostrava. He died on October 16, 2022.
