Pavel Jež

"In my nineteen years of age we were considered heroes in France. The metro, the theatre, museums we had for free. One time we were walking under the Eiffel Tower with a friend, and we met two young ladies. When we got talking, they found out we were from Czechoslovakia, and they invited us to lunch - she was the daughter of the Czechoslovak ambassador."

"I deserted to the Allies when I found myself in between the fronts, that is both the Germans and the English were shooting. A tank drove out on to a meadow, I ran up in front of it, put my hands up, a sergeant got out [unintelligible] and all the Germans stood behind us. Then they took me to Cherbourg, and the Germans they took into captivity."

"Right after the war, still a bachelor, I joined the National Socialists, that seemed to me to be kind of the ideal party. Then in 1948, the Communists came to me to try and have me spill out who all was in the party, so they could arrest them. But I talked myself out of it. I was about twenty-three or twenty-four then."

"When Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Poles signed a non-aggression pact with him in 1934, and then they helped him pick the republic apart, like I said - but not all of them. Everything has its beginning, just as every bomb has its load and its fuse, so the fuse of the First World War was the Assassination in Sarajevo, and the fuse of World War II was the Munich Dictate."