Pavel Dimun

“I called First Lieutenant Reicin, asking him to send somebody else to my post, because I had such a cold that I was unable to move. He told me: ´Moving or not moving, you have be there! Do whatever you want! ´ And so I said to this telephone operator, this Volhynian Czech: ´Run away from here, but first help me bring some deadwood to make fire in the stove.´ ´But there will be smoke and the Germans will see it.´ ´So they’ll see it, I don’t care, ´ I replied. It would be a pity if they killed this boy, and so he ran away, I don’t know where. I started fire in the stove, and smoke began coming out. Then the sun rose, and one could see it far away. Reicin called me and asked: ´What are you doing in there? ´ ´Well, I’m sweating. I covered myself with these lousy German blankets.´ ‘But the Germans are going to kill you. And where’s that boy? ´ ´OK, they’ll kill me then. I sent the boy away, ´ I told him. Eventually, what happened was that the Germans regarded this as a provocation to incite them to open fire, but they did not even fire a single bullet.”

“Ivan Dimun from Čertižné, who was my namesake, didn’t pay taxes from his property, and therefore they confiscated his cow. There were some Agrarian Party supporters together with the district commissioner. It was in the evening. They had lamps for lighting, and then they began making speeches. One of them blew out the lamp and they began beating one another in a complete chaos. The agrarians with the commissioner had a car, and so they took to their heels and left. People then gathered again. In Čertižné there was a police station, and the policemen drove this crowd to the station. They had firearms, too, but they were only shooting in the air. The following morning the news reached us in Habura, and therefore we set out to Čertižné to help the people there. The commissioner mobilized the entire district, and policemen arrived in Čertižné in cars from all over, and we from Habura followed them.The official who had confiscated the cow just happened to show up there, and people beat him, and on top of that, one of us managed to cut the telephone line from the police station. This put us into trouble, because they turned the incident into a revolt. They began to call it the Habura-Čertižné revolt. Other policemen then arrived, even all the way from Prague. They took over Habura, separated the people and they began interrogating the people from Čertižné and Habura. Mostly those from Habura, because most of the communists were living there. They interrogated the mayor, who was a communist party chairman, but they were just listening to what he was telling them. Then they were taking us one by one, and when it was my turn, they began beating me furiously. I eventually had to confess. They were beating me with truncheons; what hurt most was when they used a thin truncheon. When we confessed, they threw us onto the straw floor in the school building, and then they manacled us in groups of four, put us into cars and took us to Medzilaborce.”

“After that, I became inconvenient for the Castle Guard, and so I went to work in the court guard, but even there I was regarded as "inconvenient". And so they locked me up. My wife went to see Dr. Vaš, reminding him that he knew me, and that even the president was asking why I had been imprisoned. The thing was that I was an old communist, and I had not joined the Party. This Doctor Vaš told my wife that I would not go anywhere and stay there. He even had my attorney, who had allowed me to have visitors, to be exchanged on the behalf of another to lead the investigation of my case. Thus I was sentenced to nine months of imprisonment. I served my term and this was the end of the war for me. I’m still alive.”

“We were a patrol of three men, we were armed with bayonets, but we were strictly forbidden to hurt anybody. People in Jablonec were shouting "Heil Hitler" with the Nazi greeting, like they still know to do, even today. We were patrolling in the suburbs of the town. I could not speak German and so I was not alarmed, but the other two soldiers probably understood German. There were little girls, five or six years old, walking by in skirts – and you know what they did? They spat out and said: ´Pah, Czech swine!´”