“Our turn came when we reached a wood where there were tank entrenchments. We jumped into the wood and ran left and right. I can still hear the sound of bullets hitting the tree trunks. After some two kilometres of running, we stopped in a little clearing for a moment. Jirka Panuška, who served as a cook for SS (Schutzstaffel), took out a piece of lard from his underarm, and a loaf of bread from his other underarm, and he gave a little of it to each of us, because we had no strength left.”
“I had to bend over the backrest of the chair and he was beating me with a leather cow-whip. I fainted and I woke up in my cell. For several weeks I was sleeping as I was standing and leaning against a corner of a bunk bed. I was leaning on the corner of the beds. There were about five interrogations like this. When a Hitlerjugend member passed by, he would run up to the balcony with his right hand raised in the Nazi greeting, and when he finished, he would turn to me and beat me for not having gotten up and greeted him properly.”
“Zwickau had the mark ZW. The others were marked D or L for Dresden or Leipzig. Thanks to our youth – Mirek was twenty-one, Frantík was already fifty-nine and I was twenty, we escaped from the hell. Before we left I noticed about a thousand women from Warsaw who have just arrived, and they were ordered to undress completely, and a pile of valuables was left in front of each of these women. They had gold. Everything was taken away from them.”
“Finishing works for the operation of the camp. They were building a new concentration camp. There was an electrical fence leading to the yard of the Auto Union Werk Horch factory, and we had to walk by it every day and night. There was a gate guarded by SS (Schutzstaffel) who were counting the prisoners, and already while we were a long distance from it, they would always give us an order to get ready, and one day I forgot and an SS man immediately jumped to our row of five and he kicked me violently. My butt then hurt terribly.”
“As I said, I had already paid the fee for my dance lessons, because there was a course of dance to be held there, and Houba invited me to Prague. Then it all collapsed. It was on Friday and I received a notice from the labour office in Semily that I was to report to the train station in Jičín on Monday morning due to a work assignment in the German Reich. Everything was gone. About two hundred of us assembled in the train station in Jičín. There were mostly people from the Jičín region. The person who lived the closest from there was a friend of mine, who was from Běchary, which is right behind Jičín. The Germans boasted that they had everything ready for us, but in reality it took us all of the afternoon just to reach Ústí nad Labem.”
Josef Mikule was born August 13, 1923 in Lomnice nad Popelkou in former Czechoslovakia. He attended the elementary school in his native town for eight years, and in 1937 he went to Jítrava near Jablonné v Podještědí in order to learn German language there. He eventually had to leave the border region and he thus started a one-year vocational training in Libštát. When he completed the course, jh began working in the ironmonger’s Kučera in Lomnice nad Popelkou. However, in March 1943 he received a draft notice to do forced labour and he had to go to Miřetice near Klášterec nad Ohří, where he worked in the company SUMAG (Sudetendeutsche Maschinen und Gerätebau), which produced mainly aircraft parts. While working there, he joined the so-called Klášterec Band, a group of Czechs and seven ‘ostarbeiter’ (workers from Ukraine or Russia). They held meetings in the forest where they planned to attack the Werkschutz guards and disarm them, but on June 29, 1944 they were arrested by the Gestapo and transported to Karlovy Vary for interrogations. The Czechs were then transported to the concentration camps Flossenbürg and Mauthausen. The leader of the group Jiří Holeček eventually died in Mauthausen. Josef Mikule was transported to the Flossenbürg concentration camp on September 7, 1944, but already during a selection process on September 13 it was determined that he would be sent to the auxiliary camp in Zwickau. He arrived to this city in Saxony on September 29, 1944 and his work there consisted in repairing aircraft parts in the company Auto Union. He witnessed the air raid on nearby Dresden while he was there. On April 13, 1945 he was included in a death march, but he was released when they were near Weiden in der Oberphalz. He tried to get home, but he was arrested in nearby Stříbro by a member of Volkssturm and imprisoned for a brief time in this town. On April 26, 1945 he managed to return to Lomnice nad Popelkou, where he survived until the liberation of Czechoslovakia, although his health was severely affected. In October 1945 he was drafted to do military service, but due to his past internment in the concentration camp he only underwent basic training and then he was assigned to serve in the regiment’s communications centre. After his military service he worked in the ironmonger’s Kučera in Lomnice nad Popelkou, and later in the Technolen company in the same town. He eventually became the manager of the technical depot. He retired in 1982. He died in 2018.
