Rudolf Hable

"The next day, our pilots were still trying to resist, taking up their armpits and walking the runway to prevent the Russian planes from landing. At night - the guys pulled out the keys to the radio station - we tuned the radio station to the flying frequency where the controller was controlling the approach, and at least we talked into it, like, 'Sovetskiye fascisti, idita domoj!' And always, 'Ja ně ponimaju. Who is it? Kto eto?' Then they tuned to another frequency, and we found it again, and we jammed it again. That was all we could do that night. The next day, they brought us some First Republic buckles from the warehouse, so we changed them. Instead of a star, we had a lion."

"I managed stop a trabant from the GDR. And because I knew German, I started talking to them, and they said, 'What's going on, isn't there going to be some big military exercise?' And I told them, 'No, it just ended recently.' I don't know if it was the Vltava exercise, but we were with the Russians together.There was always one Russian and one Czech. And the officers: one Russian and one Czech. So they served with us, they learned it perfectly. And even though I thought that maybe not, I was still scared. So I didn't leave it until the last train, when I arrived at the barracks around midnight, and I went one train early, around ten o'clock. I went to air traffic control first, and I said to the guys, 'Isn't there going to be a military exercise or something? Because these dederons told me that they said there was a lot of troops and they had painted white lines on the tanks and everything.' Well, they said, 'No, it's okay, there's a landing gear announcement.' If there was a landing gear announcement, it meant that either some high ranking officer or something was flying... and military planes weren't allowed to take off. So I went to the company to go to bed and sometime after midnight - such a roar! Planes started landing. I said, 'What's going on? They said there was a landing gear announcement...'"

"When [my father] enlisted, he was transferred near Dresden, where there were prison camps. There were prisoners mostly from Africa, Ethiopia and so on. He guarded those prisoners, took them to work with the farmers. There he said it was still good. The problem arose when a colleague he served with had a leave of absence and they put another soldier in, he was quite a fanatic. When he led them through the woods and had them picking blueberries again, he reported him. He got in trouble for it and said he had to choose between getting shot or the Eastern Front. So he chose the eastern front. But later he said, 'What have we tried there! In freezing temperatures in summer uniforms. That was a disaster! We were already wearing all kinds of clothes, we were tying ropes around our legs so we wouldn't freeze.' That front in Russia, it was terrible..."