Milan Kašuba

“We thus arrived at the border between Austria and West Germany. We arrived there and they told us: ‘We cannot let you pass, you don’t have the exit permission.’ Ruda said that he would go and take care of it. The officer told him: ‘Well, go then, but somebody has to stay here as a guarantee.’ And so I stayed there. I lay down on the lawn right on the border, the weather was nice, it was in summer. I was lying in the grass comfortably, it was in June or around that time. Two hours later Ruda returned back from the Austrian border and he said: ‘Let’s go.’ We thanked them and we went back and then we drove for about one kilometre away from the border guard post. We arrived at an intersection and a Volkswagen van arrived there, and the driver told us: ‘Follow me.’ We drove for about a kilometre and a half away from the border crossing and there were fields. As we were driving there to a place where they were no longer able to see us, we got into his car and in the forest there we moved all our things in into that car. He had an axe and we cut some branches from a tree and we covered our car with them. We had moved our stuff from our car into his. And we drove on that road and he ordered us: ‘Get down.’ We all hid and it looked as if he was the only one in the car and he thus drove us into Austria.”

“What was probably the worst was that in spring 1945 we were going to Petrov with mom and there was a children’s playground. It was not by some intuition, but we went home and bombs began dropping again. Fortunately, I am still here, as you can see, but from the children who were up there in the playground, none of them survived. So these are my worst memories that I can share with you. Therefore I think that if somebody says that there is only a small war somewhere, I always look at him and I think that he is probably not in his right mind, because experiences like that stay with you forever. And it is not necessary to discuss it any further.”