Ing. Jiří Havlík

“There was just the occasional air raid, life was quite peaceful there otherwise. The officers who trained us were okay enough. They knew they needed us, so I guess they were nicer to us than they’d normally be. I was just out of secondary school, and as a boy I didn’t know what to expect there, so I wasn’t really afraid. The important thing was that I didn’t go to Germany alone, there was a hundred of us. We were encouraged by the fact that we were together. [Q: Do you see it more as an adventure, or as danger?] More as an adventure. I only saw the danger when I got there, when we arrived in Kiel and they took us from the station to the hotel, where we were accommodated. Right that moment there happened to be planes over Kiel, and they shot at them from the ground. Parts of the rounds fell down on us, and we thought they were shooting at us. That was nasty, but then we got used to it and we weren’t afraid any more.”

“That was in Kiel. We were about one hundred Czech together, and so we took it better. We were assigned there to put out fires caused by air raids in Kiel and Hamburg.”