Jiří Fochler

“They made available a part of their company employees to the organization Todt. When that wasn’t enough, the labor office provided the rest of the manpower. They enlisted uncomfortable people who didn’t want to cooperate with them and so it happened that there were three of us from Olšany. There was nobody from some villages but for example from Leština, where there was a majority of Communists, there were thirteen people. They put together a hundred people and we got a summons to Germany, to Berlin, in the Todt organization. My dad - when he received that summons that demanded me to go to Berlin - slammed his fist on the table. He said: ‘What’s that? You're an underage! How do they dare to take you away from me? Come with me, we'll go to Šumperk to the labor office’. We came to the office and my dad started yelling at them. Of course, he spoke fluent German. I could also speak German because we had German at school. At that time it was mandatory just like religion. The official responded: ‘Stop yelling at me! The boy was authorized by the German state and you should shut up! And if you continue to yell at me, you’ll go to jail for demeaning German laws. Sitting in jail for a few years will teach you some respect’. Dad saw that it was bad and thus we better left. He told me: ‘Son, I can’t do anything about it, you’ll have to go’.”

“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.”

“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.”

"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.”