Milan Kroupa

“During the first winter we were given work clothes which had been left behind by the Germans. They gave us whatever they had stripped from the Germans before. When we went to the town to dig a ditch for a cable, people thought that we were German prisoners, because they have never seen a PTP soldier in their lives. We had no shoes, only rubber boots. We had to work in that for the whole winter in snow. There was no such thing as sweaters or padded coats. We did whatever we could to wrap our feet in newspapers and place newspapers under our shirts so that we would not freeze. It was nothing pleasant. It was in forests. There was no hot water, and there was almost no cold water, either.”

“Once they allowed her to come to visit me, but I told her that she should rather not come, because it was humiliating. There was a room for visitors. There was a wire fence from the ceiling all the way down and there was a gap of about thirty centimetres and then there was fencing all the way to the ground so that we could only see each other through the holes in the fence. That was humiliating. I told her, why did you even get this idea to request a visit? You should not have begged them for anything. I would have been able to endure it. Well, but she was my mom, and so she wanted to see me.”