Petr Esterka

“And I knew from how I played football which way to go to get to Austria. So I knew that, so we crawled through the corn and reached the forbidden zone. There was even a sign there, we read it: ‘Warning, you are entering the forbidden zone.’ It was getting dark. It was getting dark when we jumped out of the train. We were protected to an extent, in that we couldn’t quite be spotted from a distance. And then we passed the houses, and you could see that there were some towers there and the forbidden zone. I even wrote that somewhere, that there were three fences, so I had to cut through them. One of them probably had high voltage in it, so it was also dangerous in that sense. We had the combination pliers. The fences were about one metre apart, but three in a row. One of them had electricity in it because it had these kind of cups on it. We had to cut through, so I know we cut two of the wires to get through. How did they guard those wires [fences]? People talked about it, it was a kind of public secret. We knew about it, but we also knew that we didn’t know much and that not much information got out. So we went into the unknown, we said with God’s help: ‘Virgin Mary, the time has come, Mother of Sorrows, hear our voices. In danger and hardship, thy intercession shall save us. Do not turn down the pleas of your children so fervently mourning.’ And then we attacked the wires, and then there was one more wire that couldn’t be seen. And thank God, because it was getting towards morning, we saw it. I still don’t know what it was, but I guess it was the signalling wire.”

“Mum knew it, and so did Dad. They weren’t stupid. And so I prepared myself. I was also interrogated by State Security, that was rough. [Q: Where was your rendezvous with the boys? The train station in Hodonín?] I think it was in Hodonín, yes, and then we travelled to Břeclav. By train, because we needed to get to the borders. Before we reached Mikulov, we had to go to Břeclav. And in the train, that was blood-curdling - the question was whether the police checked it. For one thing, we saw the obstacles as we rode by in the train. It went by the wires [fences], so we saw how taught the wires [fences] were. So we had to overcome that somehow. I remember we tried not to sit together. I sat by myself, and the other two say in another compartment. You tried to be inconspicuous, but they it was... but we seemed to have managed somehow because there we were approaching Mikulov, and I remember I jumped off the train as it was still moving because I didn’t want to go all the way to Mikulov because there were patrols there, of course. And then, of course, we couldn’t go straight to the borders, so we walked around the bottom side of Mikulov Hall. The train stopped, and because the people got out and went into the town, we had to go with them, we couldn’t go in the other direction, there weren’t any houses there. And so basically, we walked with them, and the question was, how far should we go. Then turned right into some street. That was on the outskirts because there were farm houses there, and we could the jangling of chains. We could just see some lights shining, there was a woman there, she was standing outside talking with some other woman who was leaning out of the window. When we set off there, they must have heard our steps because the women disappeared. So we were alone there, and what were we to do.”