“At the beginning of December I joined the Wehrmacht. Of course you know how it was… mum, when her boy is off to war. I joined in Bayreuth, well and then later we were transferred to Ansbach, even further than Nuremberg. I undergone an infantryman training in three months and off to the front.”
“I also remember my mum sent me a package to the front in Ansbach and packed a Christmas cake in it. And before it could reach me, as I was out in the trenches, we came back totally frozen in the barrack and I got the package. I opened it and of course the cake was riddled with mould in and out. I offered it to my friends and nobody wanted any. And I thought, if no one wants it, I will have a bite. Not that I was so hungry, but I wished to get in a hospital possibly. I ate it with disgust and of course nothing wrong happened to me. On the contrary, the mould, and back then no one knew about it, contained penicillin cultures. So that was a just a little episode of mine.”
“It went bang near me and I threw myself to the ground as any soldier can save himself by falling on the ground. That is his only chance. It may have been due to the pressure or how fast I fell down and I lost my breath and blood began to run down from my nose of mouth. That was a bad combination. I knew that was bad, as boys talked about it but I said, oh well. I was pulling my rifle trigger and wanted to shoot myself. But it went bang shot off the helmet as it was a wrong angle. An older guy came running to me, realised what was happening, and pushed me in the back really hard. That was the most cruel moment I realised then… what luck I had.“
Full recordings
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Praha 8 – Domov pro seniory Slunečnice, 07.02.2017
František Kolman was born on 25th May, 1927 in Kamenice nad Lipou in a Czech-German family. During occupation he got a German citizenship after his father. After finishing an elementary and secondary school František had to join the German gymnasium in Jindřichův Hradec. In 1944, at the age of nearly 17 years he was called to serve for the Wehrmacht in anti-aircraft defence. He served at the artillery on the Western front in the town of Bayreuth and Ansbach. In March 1945 he was captured by American army and following several prisoner camps he returned to Czechoslovakia in July the same year. After studying the Engineering Faculty of the Czech Technical University in Prague he started working for Škoda Pilsen, factory in Prague, from where he also retired in 1988. At the time of filming, he lived with his wife Miloslava in a nursing home in Prague Kobylisy.
