Pavel Jež

"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."

"I wasn't afraid, I was proud. A young person doesn't think like that, I was among my own. The Soviet invasion had begun, I was nineteen years old when I joined the Czechoslovak Army."