“We set out from the Law Faculty, joined the others in front of the Philosophical Faculty and crossed the Charles Bridge and marched toward the Castle. I was almost at the end of Charles Bridge, and policemen were dispersing the crowd there. Policemen were on the end of the bridge and I got to the front row and suddenly I stood face to face with a policeman. I looked at him and said: ´Martin, what are you doing here?´ He replied: ´You lost, it’s already over. Václav, leave it! The President has signed it.´”
“In 1948 I decided that we should restore FAWOZ and go abroad, but the boys already had their jobs and they didn’t want to go. Only one of them, Zdeněk Odehnal, had been in West Germany in 1948 in a camp, and he came back because there was nothing to do there. He went there after 1948. I told him: ´Zdeněk, I won’t go, I have to finish the law school.´ In 1949 I told him: ´Zdeněk, I have graduated, could we go together? Will you guide me over the border?´ - ´OK.´ - ´Which way should we go?´ - ´Via Domažlice.´ We agreed that we would go by an express train from the main station at two o’clock. I took my younger brother with me, he also wanted to go. We met at the station and boarded the train, and Zdeněk said: ´I’ll just go and buy myself a beer.´ He went for the beer and didn’t return to the train and so we went without him.”
“We played soccer on Sunday, and I told him: ´Boss, today is my last day, because I got Technische Nothilfe.´ The club chairman was a hotel owner, he had the Hotel At Three Lime Trees in Jaroměř. He told me: ´No way, I’d rather go instead of you and you’d serve beer in my hotel.´ He said: ´Come in the evening and we’ll see what to do next.´ In the evening the officers came to his hotel for dinner and he told me: ´Go to the barracks in Josefov tomorrow!´ There were depots there, it was called Zentralersatzteillager, a central depot of spare parts, I went there, spoke to the man, told him that the hotel owner Kudrna sent me, and that I had received a notice for Technische Nothilfe. I showed the paper to him, he looked at it, saw the telephone number of the labour office written there, and he called them and explained in German that I got a notice for Technische Nothilfe, but that I couldn’t go there, because I was working for him.”
“The resistance took the barracks in Josefov. There was a guard, and I was one of the members, we took turns. We didn’t live in the barracks, we would always go home to sleep. We were taking turns every twelve hours and going there. The refugees from the east had wagons with their stuff in the courtyard. I was on guard in the barracks, in the evening I found out that there were many people, and I told them: ´Friends, pack your stuff and leave, you have no right to be here...´ They came there to steal. I walked all the way up to the ramparts and there was shooting going on, it was dark and I fell down from the ramparts. It was about eight meters high and I broke my leg.”
“Velichovky Spa is near Jaroměř, and marshal Schörner had his general staff there. Communication cables were placed in the fields, leading to the general staff who gave the orders. We, the group, were given a task to go there, cut up some 20 metres of that cable, leave and then discard it somewhere. So we cut a 20 metre piece, and we threw it into the pond in Černožice, which was about a kilometer away, and we went the other way through Rasošky to Josefov.”
Mr. JUDr. Václav Dušek, CSc. was born October 2, 1923 in Potěhy near Čáslav in a family of a railway-employee. Due to his father’s profession the family often had to move. Václav studied at elementary and a higher elementary school. In 1938 he began the 2nd grade of the grammar school in Jaroměř, and he graduated in 1945. In 1944 he managed to avoid being sentenced to forced labour in the Third Reich because he played soccer for the Slavoj Jaroměř club. In 1944 he joined the resistance group Václavík. The group’s actions included sabotage on a cable leading to general Schörner’s command. At the end of the war Vaclav guarded the Josefov fortress where he suffered a gunshot injury. After the war he studied law in Prague. He took part in the student march to the Prague castle in February 1948. In 1949 he made an unsuccessful attempt to emigrate to West Germany. He worked in the textile factory Mostex in Mostek, in Strojtex in Dvůr Králové and later in AŽD in Prague. From 1970 he worked at the Ministry of Transport, where he focused on labour law.
