“Of course that the Germans were shipping their men to the battle lines and thus there was a lack of manpower at home. It was still necessary to work at the home front, to hoe sugar beet, potatoes and so on. So they would take men away from the occupied countries who had come to the Reich and fill in the ranks. These slave laborers had to do all this work, digging potatoes, beet and I don’t know what else.”
“I worked together with this Frenchman, he was a rather young guy, and I told him: ‘look, I will not be here like this, let’s run away!’ But escaping was not an easy thing, because in the days of the occupation, if we went anywhere to the Germans, they would immediately report us to the Gestapo. So we could only travel at night and during the day we would sleep in a haystack. It was also necessary to eat, but what was there to eat? We couldn’t go to the Germans to give us a piece of bread. We would have been immediately arrested. So we collected carrots and vegetables in the fields and we washed it in a stream or river. Then we ate it. Our journey took a little over two months. The Frenchman had relatives. We could only travel at night, during the day, as I’ve said, we were hidden, otherwise they’d have arrested us. So we travelled for a little over two months across France. Then we reached the English Channel, this was our chance to get to England, via the Channel and France. It happened only very rarely, but it happened once in a while that a fisherman’s boat would come at night and we got on the boat and this is how we got to England.”
“I started studying at Oxford as the soldiers who had fought in the war had the opportunity of getting an education. So I had been admitted to the studies, we were there to learn and there were professors and so on. But my mother got sick, it was in ..., I don’t remember anymore. My dad wrote that I was supposed to come back to my mother that she may not survive, so I came back home. But then I wanted to go back to England in order to continue my studies but no, the comrades said no. They told me: ‘Comrade, you were fighting for the capitalists, not for us, you’re not going to go anywhere!”
“We fled through Germany to France to his relatives, we were really scared. But what could we do. There on the shores of the sea there were villages that didn’t cooperate with the Germans in any way. The English had their boats, with which sailed by night from England to France, along this narrow strip. Well, and so we reached England by one of those boats, and we got into the 16th Independent Tank Brigade. I served there, I was a tanker, I was wounded there, my tank was hit, I was some sixteen, seventeen years old.”
photo: Dobové fotografie jsou od dcery pana Kobierského. Současné fotografie jsou od studentů, kteří pořizovali záznam
photo: Dobové fotografie jsou od dcery pana Kobierského. Současné fotografie jsou od studentů, kteří pořizovali záznam
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Bernard Kobierski was born in 1925 in the region of Těšínsko in the part that used to belong to Czechoslovakia. He had five siblings, some of whom are still alive today. After the outbreak of the Second World War, at the age of only sixteen years, he was forced to go to work in Germany. From there, together with a French friend, they managed to escape via France to Great Britain. In England, he was at first treated with a sick stomach and then trained as a tank-crew member. He fought in battles in France where he suffered his first war-time injury. He was wounded for a second time in Italy during the Battle of Monte Casino. After the second injury, he was reassigned to the mechanized troops as a tank-crew member and trained as a radio operator. After the war, he began to study at Oxford University, but because of the bad health of his mother, he returned to Bohemia. Meanwhile, the Iron Curtain divided Europe and the Communists prevented him from going back to England. After training, he worked in a grocery store throughout the 1950s and subsequently, he was employed by the Oder River waterways. Finally, he worked as a senior financial accountant. In 1957, he married and in the 1960s, he changed his job and worked as a warehouseman at the company Technoplyn. Together with a few friends, he bought an apartment building in the Seifert Street in Prague on which he spent his war rent. However, his property was later confiscated by the communists and it was only returned after the year 1989. He lived in the military hospital in Střešovice, passed away on December, 19th, 2014.
