Karel Dohnal

“That’s the hitch, daddy was never a soldier.” – “He had some health-related reasons?” – “I don’t know, he somehow evaded it, he never wanted to talk much about it. He simply wasn’t in the army. All his friends were drafted in 1938 as Obrana národa when the mobilization came. This is how that section was called. They were mobilized and transferred to the country borders. And then there was the demobilization. And they returned from demobilization, and some of them just surrendered their weapons and went on. But some people, daddy’s friends and others, there are more of them, not only in Kněžice. In Kněžice there were 10 or 12 of them. They basically left the weapons in that old house we had, because my father hadn’t been in the army and thus there was no risk he would be checked upon and the firearms searched for. I saw these rifles. There was the mark of crossed swords on the rifle butts, the Czechoslovak army symbol, and the iron hobs which these army weapons have. I was a little boy and I went to see our neighbour, certain Rudolf Adam, who lived next door. I told him: ´Hey, we got so many firearms at home, we’ll go rabbit-hunting!´”

“I was going to school at that time, so I wasn’t aware of it. Only at the end of the war, when I already knew that some of dad’s friends went to do forced labour in the Reich. Some went willingly, some were forcibly sent there. The bombardment of Munich then started, and they ran away. Then they had to live on the lam here, because there were still policemen patrolling, searching for them, they couldn’t visit their homes, and so they lived in forests. In the forests there were some six bunkers which they used as a cover for cold. They had to survive one winter there. They also went to visit their homes. They were the soldiers from the Obrana národa organization, and they all held together. They were not an organized whole, rather they were friends who held together since the beginning of the war. They simply wanted to fight for freedom. They were in the forests and I knew about them. I was a ten-year-old boy then. I called them uncles, I knew them by their first names. One day Ráček came and told me to bring food for them there. I put it into my rucksack, and went on skis. They had a fire there, I gave the food to them. One of them got up and carried the rucksack away, another gave me bread and a piece of fat and told me to eat. I was so flabbergasted, I only brought them some snacks and they gave me such a nice meal.”

“When the Germans withdrew, my father informed all to withdraw. He didn’t eat anything since the morning, so he stopped at home. I remember we had smoked meat, dumplings and cabbage. Everything was on the table, and from the window I could see the mountains and the upper bridge. They rode there, the tanks stopped. We hid all the meat away. We went to the cellar, and my father was gone. He had two guns with him, he hid them and ran away. The Germans were already up there on the rock. On the other side of the promontory near Podskalí. From there they could see the entire village of Kněžice, and they began shooting at my father. Dad had met some legionnaires before, and he knew from their experience that if they are shooting at you, you should jump to the place where a bullet went, because the next bullet will not fall in the same place. Dad remembered it and he jumped there in that muddy meadow. He ran away, the Germans didn’t hit him from up there. He ran for the forest and there was a bullet hole in his rubber boot. Near that forest there were a husband and wife living in the very last house in Podskalí, and they saw it. Dad allegedly fell to the ground, then got up and continued running. They came to us and told us that he would probably be lying dead somewhere, that they had seen him fall down. That we should go and look for him. But where were we to go? Mom gathered us and we went to wait in that cellar.”