Karel Gebauer

“When I was returning from my leave, a woman with her son caught up with me, the boy was perhaps twelve, thirteen, or fourteen years old. They both carried full rucksacks, plus full bags in their hands. They addressed me first, and we started talking: ´What have you got?´- ´We went to buy shoes.´ I was in my civilian clothes, they didn’t know anything. ´We have a trail here, and we use it when we go to Poland.´ When they reached the trail, I told them: ´You might be angry at me, I’m sorry, but…´ I pulled out my card. ´But you have to come with me!´ What a shock for them. I led them to our office. At that time there was an unwritten rule that if we found shoes with rubber soles, we could let it go, but if they had leather soles, we had to confiscate them. Now imagine that: they had one hundred and five pairs of shoes in these rucksacks and bags! I sorted them out. There were perhaps ninety pairs of rubber-soled shoes. I gave them to them and I confiscated the rest. They were so happy! I told them: ´Now go to Poland, and do whatever you wish. If they catch you, well, they will.´”

“If you haven’t got a single potato and not even a crumb of bread, only then are you really hungry. This is hunger, you know. If you have bread and water, that’s not real hunger. I experienced what real hunger was. One day I was walking the street leading from the St. Thomas church, and fish soup made from whale meat was being handed out there without food stamps. It smelled so bad when you passed by. God… and I was so hungry. I kept walking the street. I won’t go there, it stinks. Ill go there, I’m hungry. I walked back and forth many times. Eventually I thought, there’s nothing else to do, you have to go there. And I went to get the soup. I ate it with great appetite. Well, that’s the way it was.”

“They assigned me to work with a turn-bench, drilling holes into some parts. These were allegedly components for aerial machine guns. Whether it was true or not, I don’t know. There was a 0,2 mm tolerance, which is a pretty wide margin. I seldom kept the dimensions. I would take a hammer and hammer it out a bit. Germans then came to take these machine guns. From a hundred-piece batch they selected only five good pieces. The rest had to be repaired. The foreman then came and told us: ´Boys, do it better, I will get into trouble otherwise.´”

“The army appeared. There was our barrier and a German barrier. The Germans arrived and stopped in front of that German barrier and went to the German border post. It took about five or ten minutes and then they opened the barrier. Their officer came to our barrier, opened it, came to our post and said: ´Sie müssen Waffen abgeben.´ You have to surrender weapons. I could speak German at that time, now I only remember some bits. We had been brought up to sacrifice our lives for the Republic, and I did not want to surrender the weapons. I told him that he had to tell me his name, and he replied: ´Leutnant Halle, Kavalerie Regiment 27.´ If it was true or not, I don’t know. Well, he took my rifle and disarmed Rešl, too. There was a field telephone, which was connected only from our post to the customs office in Rychaltice. I grabbed the handle and turned it to make a call. He hit my arm, the receiver dropped from my hand and he said: ´Lassen Sie das!´ Leave it alone. He moved on and the German army followed him, obviously.”

“I was helping at home and I was to have the night shift from Saturday till Sunday. With Trojan. I came back quite tired after the harvesting. We took our orders – where we were supposed to patrol, and when, and we had quite a lot of free time in between. I told him I was tired and since we had that spare time, I suggested we walk a bit and then spread our raincoats on the ground and doze off for a while. We did it. It was a clear August night, and I woke up and saw a bunch of people. I told him, Vilo, get up! We took our torches and rifles and shouted: ´Halt!´ They were surprised, and so were we. We had these electric torches. We counted them, there were twenty-seven persons. About four men, and the rest of them women. I told them.: ´If one of you gets lost, none of you will go home.´ We took them to our office, counted them again and there were twenty-eight of them! We looked at each other laughed about it and that was it. They were smuggling some lard, cigarettes, a little of alcohol.” Interviewer: “And where from and to?” – “from Poland to Czechoslovakia.” They were very much afraid that we would hand them over to the Poles. We confiscated the alcohol and cigarettes. The lard was dirty, we let them keep it. We told them: ´Now go and be careful, don’t let the Poles catch you.´” Interviewer: “These people were Polish?” Witness: “They were Poles and they were afraid, because if they got caught, they would send them to do construction work in Warsaw. For three months and without pay.”