František Herget

“The beginning was interesting, at least to me, in that they brought us there and from the railway station we walked to the Munich brewery, to this large hall. And various companies came there to choose workers among us. And since I only had a trade academy, I had not learnt any practical trade, I got to the group which eventually remained there till the end. People from these factories, who came to pick workers, wanted skilled people, craftsmen. And the bunch of us who remained – we had no such skills. And none of the factories were interested in us. Thus it was the turn for various military and other organizations – each of us said what he could do, and according to this they were interested in hiring him. Well, we were like in a marketplace. And the rest of our group, well, there were about a hundred of us remaining, there were people from the army, from wehrmacht, who had their depots in Munich and who needed some workers there as well. But we did not yet know what awaited us. They started calling our names, and then loaded our group into a bus and took us away. We did not know where we were going and what we would do there. We did not know each other. At that time, for a boy like me, with no great experience, it was quite tough.”

“Those who have not experienced it cannot imagine it. When there were the air raids on Pilsen here, some people who lived nearby have also experienced it. But while there, we never knew when and how the alarm would sound, or what would happen. And we did not even have shelters. Actually, in our free time we were digging shelters in an open space behind the walls, where we only put some old beams over it, as protection against splinters. Since we were in the midst of military installations, there was a reason to fear that. And you never know, because eventually this barracks, which would have made a good military target, lasted till the end of the war. While parts of the city were destroyed. One does not quite understand how it really was.”

“I was lucky, because there were also those guys from Moravia, they were already more worldly-wise, and they were good guys. So we would stick together. And we became friends, so that from the very beginning, when we were handed over to the commanders of this military depot and they began training us, they wondered at it, and so did we. For we began to stick together from the beginning, and we ourselves chose from among us those who could speak some German. Even though we did not know each other, it became apparent who knew his way around, who was able to ´sell´ himself. We elected these guys as our foremen and we were lucky, because they were really honest and nice people. Thus as I said, for all these two and a quarter of years that I have spent there, from the beginning, when we became a group, quite simply, I was really lucky that I had got into such a group. Because as I learnt later from some of my friends whom I had a chance to meet, I can say I was lucky. For instance, I went to Nurnberg to see one of my friends, and when I saw the conditions in which he was working, I have to say I was really lucky. Or another friend, I went to visit him in Stuttgart, he worked for the railways. His job was cleaning the ash from steam locomotives, terribly ugly work. And he had to live in some private rented room. And he had no friends there. I think that was the worst thing for him.”

“We really learnt that not all the Germans were the same. You could not trust them, some of them were placed there... The relations between them were tense, it was quite tense after the SS men had come there. We learnt this especially after one air raid, when they shot down a plane right above us, and the Americans who had jumped from that plane were landing with parachutes just close to us. And our boys were so crazy that they went there to give them a welcome. And the SS men who stood by then came to us and took them away. They loaded this group of fifteen or sixteen people into a bus and took them away. And there we realized how lucky we were, because the commander of this facility where we were, even though he was a German, he took it upon himself and he got the boys back from these SS men, and they were handed to him, to the wehrmacht, for punishment. There we saw what the relations between these groups of Germans were. And we were so lucky that this man was an elderly and reasonable gentleman, who himself had his son in the army, somewhere on the front. Thus for us it was a great advantage, we have learnt that not all the Germans were the same, that he treated us so reasonably. And this way he got back the group which the SS men had taken away, and now they had to bring them back. For me, this was a proof that not all the Germans were the same.” “May I ask you how he punished them afterwards? When you mentioned that he said he would punish them himself.” “They were locked up. But this was actually jail which belonged to our army group, which they had for their own soldiers, like it is in every army. They spent about a week there. But what mattered was that they did not stay with the SS men, for you cannot tell how it would have ended.”