Oldřich Glet

“So, we trained the marches because it should have been concluded by a festive parade for the officials, main commanders and it happened, I assume, on the 13th of May. And then we marched there, those who were available there, in front of Montgomery and General Liška as the main commander of the brigade. It ended with it and in a few days, we packed and then we spent five days on our way home on our own. We, at least I as a radio operator, had two radios in a tank so I was interested in what had been going on in the world. So, when I was free for a while, I spent a lot of time sitting on a radio, on one of them, I had to connect the second one to a certain frequency and I listened to the radio, to BBC. I caught it even in Czech but in many cases just because I was fairly lucky. And well, I got to know that part of our unit was leaving for there, that they were advancing in our territory. I got to know about the Prague uprising and so on. All of this was known but I got to know when the end of the war would be only when the Germans like crazy, they hadn´t been shooting before, so suddenly there was a fire as if it had been a festival and there were skyrockets and other things. They were already celebrating the end of the war and we even did not know about it yet.”

“In quite a short while the Frenchmen and finally the owners of the small hotel found out that we were not Germans, but Czechs and it gave an impulse that they and eventually the organization of French resistance movement FFI started. And I discovered it thanks to the fact that the headmistress of a local school invited us to an evening gathering where we spoke quite openly about us wanting to get to the other side. So, because of this it was offered to us whether we wanted to help with the crossing to Switzerland. Naturally we agreed with it and it happened afterwards. We expected the right time and it came when the owner of the company left for two-day journey to Germany where they had their central office. And nobody guarded us. We took advantage of it and they took us across the borders with help of the two, I call them partisans. It was not exactly easy as the Vlasov army had arrived a week or ten days before it on their tachankas and they guarded the boarders with Switzerland to prevent escapes. They were riding horses along the border and so on. We saw it during the time when we were crouched in a potato field waiting for a Swiss soldier who was at a certain place supposed to open us a wired fence that was along the whole Swiss border. It was so that we could get to the other side.”

“Well and they transported us for two days from there to Marseilles in cattle cars. Well and in Marseilles we walked directly from the train station to Marseilles prison where we practically lied in the cells that were intended for... because it was a newly built, a prison built in 1938 in France. for felons that had been taken to Guiana, to French Guiana. If you know the book ‘Papillon‘ and so on, he had been still transported whereas after it they were imprisoned in this prison. There were, in the cell that was intended for one, ten of us sleeping on bare concrete. And there, as I have said, we used two blankets that I had forethoughtfully taken with me. Because we had at least one blanket under us and we could cover with the second one. And the worst thing was that they perceived us as captives. Colonial units of French Army guarded us, but the economic management of the prison was in German hands and it was in command of a German captain in full, amazing armour with honours, who even personally invited me to persuade me not to join the foreign army.”