“On 6th June 1944, when the invasion started, we were sleeping in tents, we were near Chichester, it was called Czech Airfield. It was not very nice. Well, it was actually supposed to start on 5th June and then it was postponed for one day because it was raining terribly. We were in tents, completely wet and they still started. When we had each the third day-off – we had a day-off at that time too – I can´t remember any more if we had a day-off when there was an emergency. But in each case we had each still some friends in Chichester where we could sleep normally in a dry bed, because in the tent it was uncomfortable.”
“Normally the Spitfire had one more tank at the bottom, to be able to fly further. And now we put bombs there instead of the tanks. Each Spitfire got a bomb, we hanged it there, it went to the other side, released the bomb and returned immediately, received another bomb. It could do five or six air-raids over the Channel in one night. And we were there at night, it was day and night… I remember, at that time I borrowed from one I had visited in Chichester, so there they lent me a book, Gone with the Wind, it had been just published at that time. So I was reading the book. And always in a while I had to put a bomb, I read for a while, and so I didn’t sleep at all, for several whole days I couldn´t… We thought that we would go after them, because it was said that the Czechs would go too, that they would occupy an airport there and we would go to France… Evidently Beneš arranged it somehow at that time, I don’t know from which reason, he might not have wanted to put us in danger, so we actually stayed…”
“When we came to the pub, they are the restaurants – of course I never went alone, I always went with somebody, we were always a group. So there was somebody called let´s say Holman or… shortly some friends we were going with, and now we were sitting there and some pilots arrived too. But pilots, they went to others, they never went to the same pubs. But still we were sitting with them, singing Czech songs, this the Englishmen always liked very much, wherever we came, we had to sing… But there was never any hostility between the ground men and the pilots, no… maybe that I didn´t experience it myself. And not even with a sergeant. Sergeant, it is a foreman already. And there, in England, a sergeant is another group already. (Such a caste system…) Yes, caste system, exactly that it was… But today they don´t speak about it too much. When I see there in the film, the Dark Blue World, how they are friends together, I think that it is not possible, that… well, they went to their one, and the sergeants to the other canteen… and accommodation, they were never accommodated in the same building.”
“And suddenly they came for me, in August 1950, tomorrow will it be how many years? Tomorrow, on 28th August… (Fifty four… What did they tell you, what charge did they bring against you?) That I was an English spy. I had friends in England, didn´t I. At first I was even afraid that I would get death penalty, but in the end I got eighteen years. Eighteen years… but I served only five… Then I got away. It was horrible.”
“Jan Masaryk was in England very popular. He came to us, it was then near the end when he became the minister of defence. He didn´t want it, he said: ´I am no soldier, I don´t know what it will be like…´ And so he came to us: ´Yes, so I am your minister.´ At first he wanted to speak English, because we were still at the airport in Kent. He came there and what he mainly did was that he was supposed to talk to us, he was doing a propaganda for Czechoslovakia, so there were all those potentates, those English officers and English personnel and he spoke to them in English about Czechoslovakia and so on. And then he said if the English could leave and ´Czechs, you stay, I want to talk to you.´ So about fifty of us stayed there, the English had left already, and we were talking to him about everything – and I know that one of us asked how it was – we were afraid at that time already if Russia would not occupy us. I remember it very well, Masaryk said: ´I will tell you a joke – there was a farmer and he had a rabbit and a dog. And the rabbit and the dog liked each other. And one day the farmer came and the rabbit was eaten, the dog had eaten him. So he said: ´Please, why did you eat him, you liked each other so much? Yes, but he did so at me…´ Masaryk said so – and he was right.”
“In 1950 I was imprisoned. At first I was in Jáchymov and then they sent me to Slavkov. When I got to Prokop (a labour camp in Horní Slavkov – remark of the editor), so straight away when I arrived there, suddenly there was Vondráček, who had worked as an instrument man with us, I think that he was a corporal. He saw me and said immediately: ´We have a group here who are here, who were at RAF, and once a week we meet.´ So we were meeting there always… And one more thing – he told me that he would arrange for me that I wouldn´t have to do hard work. So he arranged it for me because he was there for a longer time already. So I got then to… that I was an engineer. He had a foreman there and the foreman had an improvement suggestion or something, or he even wanted to get a patent or I don´t know any more, shortly… He needed something drawn, so I drew it for him. For that I then got to the compressor hall, there were compressors, so in that compressor hall I was thank to the Vondráček, that he arranged it for me… So we were helping each other even after that.”
Jiří Grant was born on 30th June 1920 in Prague in a completely assimilated Jewish family. He studied at a gymnasium, and took his leaving exam in April 1939 on the same day he left Czechoslovakia with his mother. After two months he succeeded in getting to London where his father and brother had gone earlier. After he had mastered the language enough, he started to study at a mechanical technical college. He passed his first state exams in England during the war. In 1942 he was recruited to the army (training in Leamington Spa), and to the air force. However, due to his eyesight problems he was transferred to the ground personnel. He worked as a mechanic (servicing of the motors of the Spitfire plane), at the 312th from 1944, then at the 310th Czechoslovak fighter squadron of the RAF until the end of the war. At the end of the war he passed the officer exam, and became a second lieutenant. After the war he returned to Czechoslovakia, got married, and within two years finished his studies as a mechanical engineer. He then started to work in Prague - Smíchov in the Škoda factory. In 1950 he was arrested, accused of espionage and sabotage, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He was imprisoned in Leopoldov, Jáchymov and Horní Slavkov. In 1953 a part of his charges was acknowledged as false, and two years later he was released. Two days after the August invasion in 1968 he emigrated to Switzerland where he settled permanently. He entered the Federation of the Pilots of the Free Czechoslovakia. Since the fall of the Communist regime he returned to the Czech Republic regularly. He died on March 3th, 2011.
