Ludvík Korcz

“They hoarded us on to a train. The train started in the direction of Vostok and was swaying from side to side because the track was still under construction. North of Moscow we passed the Ural Mountains and we eventually arrived to Siberia. Suddenly the train stopped and we were in a forest, in the tundra. Here was the prisoner-of-war camp. Everything around was quiet and calm. They housed us here in subterranean bunkers. They were only about one metre deep because the ground there was permanently frozen; it was impossible to dig deeper. Rumanians had been there before, Rumanian captives, and only few of them were left. All the others were lying outside the camp in a cemetery. Tey had died while building the camp.”

“A fellow prisoner said: ´What do you think you’re supposed to do here? You’re so stupid that in Hitler’s time, during the war, you let the Germans fool you, and now you would be toiling as an idiot in a POW camp?´ I asked him: ´What should I do then?´ - ´An interpreter.´ I told him: ´How on earth could I work as an interpreter if I don’t speak Russian?´ - ´Come on, you know Polish, you know Czech, you know our language and Russian is similar.´ I said: ´Well, similar… a little bit, perhaps, but certainly not so similar that one would be able to speak the language.´ He said: ´I will make you an interpreter.´ To which I replied: ´Come on, how could you make an interpret out of me? What do you do?´ He said: ´Well, I’m an interpreter here.´- ´Don’t even bother, I’m not up to it, I don’t dare to do it.´- ´We shall see.´ And the following day, during a roll call, I learnt from that Russian officer who was commanding the roll call that I had been appointed an interpreter.”

“Days were passing and on March 15, 1939 the Protectorate was established. We had to surrender weapons and they sent us to Valašské Meziříčí where we were dismissed. I was thus dismissed as a private on permanent leave. Now I was without a home. I could not go home to the Těšín region because the Poles were now there, and I, actually being a Polish citizen more or less, had run away and served in the Czech army. Well, or at least I wanted to serve. Thus I found a place to stay, at my friends’ house, right at the borderline. It was three hundred metres from the creek which formed the boundary line. They did guide people across from time to time. They were mostly Jews who were running away from the Protectorate. We managed to lead about five or six people over the border. Then one day around noon, I was seen by a German sentry on the border. They shouted at me: ´Halt!´. Before the border patrolman could get out of that valley, we were gone. And since I lived close to the border, I ran into the house, immediately took off my clothes and jumped into bed. The patrol obviously did come in, but I was lying in bed. They could not say that it had been me!”

“I was working at the Ministry of Transport, when in 1958, they conducted employee checks. I was always in some kind of trouble, naturally. But still they were pressing me to serve as a labour union secretary. Nearly all the time I worked here I had conflicts with others, with people reproaching me for something or criticizing me. I still remember it as if it were today. During the checks the political department head, he was an ass, asked me a question. The director and his cohorts were sitting there, together with the Communist Party Chairman, the Labour Union Chairman and the likes, and now this special department guy asks me: ´Hey, comrade engineer, tell me, how did you become a soldier in the German army?´ I got angry because he knew the answer to this question. So I waited for him to finish the question and then I asked him: ´Comrade, where were you born?´ He was surprised and replied: ´In Prague.´ I said: ´And where were you living in 1938?´ He answered: ´In Prague.´ I told him: ´Now, look here, comrade, if I had been living in Prague, and you had been living around Těšín at that time, I would not have asked you such a dumb question today!!!´ He stared at me speechless.”