Leopold Fiala

“We were formed into an independent Czechoslovak tank brigade by the English and put into combat at Dunkerque. That’s where we guarded a fortress. It was very well secured. It was one of the best French military ports with all the guns and cannons and conceivable military equipment. All of this was seized by the Germans and used against the British and the French. We were watching them as far as it was possible, assaulting them, taking captured German POW (prisoners of war) back to our base for interrogation. It was as it is in war. I was wounded at this Dunkerque. I got into an English hospital where I stayed for seven months.”

“We came to Liverpool in England. We disembarked and they wanted to know who we are and what weapons we had. When we left France we weren’t allowed to carry anything with us. But we put the weapons that we had stolen from the French on a pile. It was a whole artillery battery, mortars and all possible things. After we sorted the weaponry and after they counted it, they said we were the best armed unit in England.”

"I was enrolled at Masaryk University in Brno and I lived at my uncle’s place, which was sort of a rather hidden basement apartment, so nobody really knew about me, not even the Gestapo. That’s where we did all of the rampaging, these student riots. We beat up some Gestapo guy and a German army officer whose gun – a pistol – we took. When I saw this I said to myself that it would be better to leave Brno than to end up being kicked on the ground like this. Of course, nobody wanted to start something with us because they were too well armed – they would have taken us down easily with their machine guns. So they did it like this: they sent German students to beat us up. Each time it was a horde of Germans, schoolboys, various students, not even students all the time, just all sorts of spongers – it was pretty German there those times. They always picked one university student, brought him to the ground and beat and kicked him as much as he could take. Then they went for the next one. When I saw this I said to my self that it would be better to leave Brno then to end up being kicked on the ground like this. So I ran away from Brno.”

"We spent a lot of time in France. I was with the artillery regiment. When I showed my leave certificate they took me for a soldier. We got to the Agde Czechoslovak military training grounds in southern France where they concentrated fugitives from all over the world. From there, they were sending readymade regiments to the battlefield. So I enrolled for the 1st artillery regiment and was assigned to the 9th battery. I got to the village of Portel. I served pretty long there. We guarded the coast because there was the danger that the Germans would do something out there. France wasn’t occupied yet but we were facing great dangers from every direction.”