Jiří Fochler

“My grandmother died and they let me know that I was supposed to come to the funeral. I was in Kiev and it’s pretty far from there. Nobody from the group was allowed to go home. There were a hundred of us who had been deployed for forced labor in the Ukraine. In the course of that period, I had been home twice. Once I was ordered to take a message to some headquarters which were located somewhere above Warsaw, where Hitler had his field office. They sent me there from Kiev with a message but it was a trap – they deceived me. Their plan was to hold me up there and send me to war. So I went there and they sent me to the conscription hall. I was supposed to get undressed behind a screen. I told them that I wasn’t there to undress and went to the office next door. I asked them why they had sent me next door to the conscriptions. I wasn’t supposed to be drafted. I told them to give me back my papers and that I’d go back to Kiev. But instead of going back to Kiev, I went home and I just made it in time for my grandmother's funeral. They said to me: ‘good that you’ve come. We’ve sent you a telegram’. I said that I had never received any telegram. I saw that there were people looking for me so I left the funeral early on and went to Prague on a train. When I got to Wenceslas Square, there were swastikas from the top to the bottom of the square. You didn’t hear any Czech there.”

“When the front line had arrived, we went to Dubno. I was supposed to meet with some of the ten guys who had escaped from the Todt Organization. I found only one. Some Zita from Jestřebí. When there was no traffic, so we stopped the cars. No one wanted to give us a ride to Rovno. Then we were taken by some NKVD agents who took us to their office and interrogated us. Then there was an air raid. They left us alone and fled into the foxholes outside of the office. For three days they kept us in the office. Then they didn’t pass us to our unit, but to a Soviet crew. Again, it took three days before we explained to them that we wanted to get to the Czech and not to the Soviet army, that we were Czechs. The Polish army tried to recruit us, the Soviets wanted to recruit us for their army, it was a mess. Everybody tried to get a piece of us.”

"In 1947, they came to me and said: ‘Look, you have to join some political party. We can’t employ anybody without any political affiliation’. So I had no choice but to join some party and therefore I joined the Social Democrats. But in 1948, I saw that people were leaving the Social Democrats and joining the Communists in large numbers. That wasn’t suitable for me because I knew the Communists. There were many of them in the Todt organization, they were from Leština. I knew their opinions and so I simply walked away from politics. When I was supposed to go to the Communist Party, I didn’t do so. I served in Holešov in the Criminal Investigation Department and they brought me to Kroměříž. There was a communist who took me over as a young one. In a month, they had to dissolve it and they threw us into uniforms. I had no rank, nothing. And I was to be command by people who went through half a year in the course and who had fully-fledged ranks, while I remained a candidate for three years.”

“I told them that I needed to go to the bathroom. That floor was in such a niche and there was barbed wire. I waited until the guard bypassed the whole object, then I tossed out my winter coat and everything else out of the window and I climbed out. But I got stuck hanging on my shoulders. Finally, I released and fell out. Suddenly, I saw that someone pulled me on a sleigh. It was in the winter. Snow was everywhere. He put me in the sleigh and rode away through Dubno. ‘Where do you want to get off? ' I said: ‘In the nearest village, I’ll walk myself from there'. Because I didn’t know who the guy was. It was already organized by the underground movement there.”