“In Girona they questioned us and I, following an advice of the French maquis, when I knew some French, pretended to be Canadian, with the aim to have a better treatment. The others didn´t dare, they proclaimed themselves to be Czechs, just I was Canadian. From Girona they drove us to Barcelona, to a huge prison Carcer modelo – Model prison. There were thousands of us there. After a week or ten days they chained us up always ten together and led us to the railway station in Barcelona. The Spanish were crying over us because they thought that we were remains of the democrats. They put us into a train, still chained together, they drove us through the whole Catalonia upstream the river Ebro up to Miranda. It is in Basque land already in the Burgos region. Funny was that if somebody in the train wanted to go to the loo, he had to go together with the chained one. He stayed outside and was holding hand… Well, such incidents there were.”
“On this occasion I would like to mention something that touches me painfully. It is the feeling of pride with which we were entering the two-year military service. For us at that time, if a young man had not been recruited, he would have felt inferior, useless. Nowadays the youth boasts about not going to the military service, that he got a green (blue) book or goes to serve the civil service. However I think that the feeling of the real patriotism would return even today with the young generation, if it came to a real threat of the national existence.”
“We arrived in Miranda where there were about 2500 prisoners from various countries already. They gave us over to the group of Czechoslovakians, about sixty people, they were led by the staff captain Šeda. I as a ´Canadian´ was put up for one night in the Canadian barrack. I told the commandant of the barrack immediately that I was Czech. On the next day he sent me over to the Czechoslovak barrack. It took nearly eight months before we got from that concentration camp further.”
“When I think about my youth until the beginning of the war, so my world opinion was considerably influenced by the fact that I was an excited exerciser of the local Sokol organization in Ostrava-Radvanice and also a member of the tenth Scout group in Ostrava. Both these institutions raised from me a man with a strong national feeling. It is called patriotism, but I don´t like this word, because nowadays it became profaned. The membership in political parties I ignored and it is strange to me until today. What was important, in Sokol there were various people together, miners, workers, studied people, mostly poor, but also rich. From various social levels, we were all really brothers to one another. The same was with the Scouts.”
“Later I got to know that on the basis of my report through doctor Kopecký from Geneva, Jan Masaryk considered it to be important. He kept pressing on doctor Formánek, our former Czechoslovak diplomat, who served with the awareness of Franco as the third secretary at the British Embassy in Madrid. Reputedly they kept asking: ´What is with Merta, where is he sticking for such a long time, such long months?´ But there was nothing to be done. January 1943 came. In the beginning of the year Franco decided to dissolve the concentration camp and to give the three and half thousand prisoners over back to France. It meant a mortal danger to the Czechoslovaks. We couldn´t make it up like that, on the basis of an initiative of Czechs and Polish most of the prisoners started to hunger-strike which lasted for eight days. The other nations joined in. (…) Franco had to recede, at that time he was already playing to both sides. He agreed that the International Red Cross brought some tins, eventually medicaments. In this way also some news got out. The international press got to know about the hunger-strike. Franco agreed that he would gradually release the prisoners from Miranda.”
The war veteran, resistance fighter, teacher and research worker Augustin Merta, among other things also the father of the known songster Vladimír Merta, was born as a posthumous child of a soldier killed in the fighting places of the World War I. He took his school leaving exam in 1932 at the real gymnasium in Ostrava. In the pre-war Czechoslovakia he worked as a teacher at a secondary school. During the Munich events Mr. Merta served as a sergeant intern in a mine-thrower troop in the Bruntál region. In the time of the Protectorate Augustin Merta became a part of the resistance group Defence of the Nation (Obrana národa) and helped to organize flights to Poland. In 1942 he was menaced by arrest, with his wife he fled through Austria, Switzerland (Geneva), France (Nice, Marseille) to Spain. He was interned in the camp Miranda del Ebro. Over Gibraltar he got in 1943 to Great Britain. He worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in London, he took part also in the siege of Dunkerque. After the end of the war Mr. Merta studied the Political and Social High School which he finished in 1949. In 1950s he could not assert himself professionally, in 1960s he worked as a researcher in the Academy of Sciences in the field of social informatics. He died in June 2006.
