František Herget

“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.”

“Speaking of the work, it was an antiaircraft equipment depot. Thus when supply wagons arrived and they had to be unloaded, it was hard work, disregarding working hours. When a delivery arrived, we had to get to work. But there were also old grandpas there with us, Germans, the old people. And we also saw it as an opportunity for doing some sabotage, just to compensate for it all somehow. For instance, when we were dispatching wagons, some were to be sent to the army in Africa and some to Siberia for change. And we would load the wagons, and when they were being labelled, we would change the destination on purpose. Thus the ammunition sent to Africa was greased to withstand freezing temperatures. And those in Siberia would get equipment for the desert, although these all were not actually weapons, but equipment for antiaircraft artillery. So we were able to do things like that there.”

“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.”