Vladimír Klenka

"People were getting out, convicts were getting out on both sides, going into the unknown in an unknown landscape, but most of those people... in Netřebice they made a kind of a connecting line from the train to Netřebice and showed these people which way to go, they were supposed to gather in these gardens, and then they drove them from there. Those who could walk would walk from Netřebice towards Velešín, and those who were not able would be taken to Velešín by a Jihostroj truck. It was interesting... these people were like lifeless, they were walking along that road, their eyes were in one direction and nothing attracted them, the surroundings, nothing at all... that they were happy to be liberated, that their great suffering was coming to an end, the handling of these people, that was something... and in those wagons there were different nationalities, French, Poles, Danes, all kinds of people..."

"We were staying in Královo Pole, where the vets were coming from, there were about three buildings of the veterinary school. On the first day, a total of 800 diggers started, 200 of us from Budějovice. There was always 200 metres marked at the field, we made these anti-tank V ditches, it was five metres wide at the top, five metres deep, and in the middle of the ditches there were paths, so the lower trencher, who was at the bottom, would throw the earth on the path, and the next one would throw it out, and the piles were piled around the trenches. If a tank was going to come in there, those were the Russian tanks then, he wouldn't get out of that. But we didn't even see the Russian tanks. We used to go to Klajdovka in Brno to make trenches for the normal soldiers, they were smaller and narrower, we always went in three lines of 200 people, we had shovels and pickaxes..."