“It was emotional. There were some Germans in the Foltys’ pub. We knew good German so we talked with them. They had a radio transmitter and they listened to American news so they knew exactly well how would it all end. They knew that the war was at its end, and how they could save themselves. Would you know how they ended? They were sitting in front of the pub on a kind of ledge. A grenade hit and two of them were dead on the spot. Not the third one. They dragged them to the pub and then, three days later when they were retreating, they buried them somewhere there. I remember that exactly well.”
“I was afraid of the Russians because half of them weren’t even Russians. I couldn’t understand them at all, they were some sort of Mongolians. I dug the trenches for the first ones, for the Germans. It was before they retreated to Opava, they built enormous trenches in front of Opava so that they would be protecgted against Russians. So I witnessed this, and I knew German well. They knew I was a Czech and I did not curse at them because it wouldn’t change anything anyway. They talked to each other and I knew that they were not happy but what could they do?”
“They were already retreating. I witnessed it at the front where they had dug horseshoe-shaped trenches. We dug the for Russians. There were, it was in a spring, major rains. They just picked us in the town, they took women as well to dig the trenches at the front. Our girls were afraid of the Russians because they had heard what they had been doing. And those girls had to go with us Czechs to dig at the front. They dug the trenches with us. They would not go near the Russians. Some of them did not managed to run away so they had to dig at the front line. The closest village was a part of Slavkov, it was inhabited entirely by Czechs who did not leave, they had some supplies. The front was there twice, it went there and back. The people had to go through all of that. We were returning from the front and we stayed in those cottages. There were large tile stoves so we would light them and dry our clothes on them. And then we went digging again and our clothes were not dry, the water evaporated but they stayed wet. And after three days, I managed to run away from the front and from the Russkis.”
Lev Mařádek was born on the 2nd of January in 1925 in the community of Zlatníky near Opava in a wind mill which was run by his grandfather. Later, he and his parents moved to Opava. He was a member of a scouts’ band and in 1938, during the mobilisation, he ran errands for the Czechoslovak army, delivering between the bunkers in the Opava area. He spent the WWII as an employee of a wholesale company which was ran by a German owner who employed young men from Czech families who thus were able to avoid forced labour in Germany. During the liberation fights, the Mařádek family lost their flat and all their property. They spent the last days of war in the village of Chvalíkovice where the front passed. Lev was forced to dig trenches by the German – and soon after, he found himself digging trenches for the Russians. He studied the business academy and until his retirement, he held several positions in the Juta textile company. In Opava, there is one Mařákova Street named after Lev’s brother Vladimír Mařádek, who was the mayor of Opava just after the war when the town was almost completely destructed and by whose effort the town was rebuilt. In 2022, Lev Mařádek lived in a retirement home in Opava. He died on October 27, 2022.
