Bohumil Moravec

“I had two horses from the Romanian royal stables. Wonderful horses. Wonderful, thoroughbred, great horses, I used to practice not only jumps, but especially manege. And you know, parting with your horse is like saying good-bye to a family member. So I took the horse’s registration documents, sealed them in a waterproof bag, and put it in its mane. And I also included a letter explaining what I had been doing with them, what kind of horses they were. And about three months later my mother received a letter, addressed to my name to my mother’s home address in Protivín, and this letter was from a captain in Hannover, who got those horses, and he wrote that he could imagine how difficult it must have been for me to part with them. A very nice letter.”

“One time, in the evening, I was walking by and saw a light flickering there. That was forbidden. I thought: ´What is it?´ So I went to see and there was a perforated empty can from American tomatoes, a candle was burning inside, and those warriors of mine are sitting around this lamp, and showing human ears to one another. I thought: ´Oh my God, what is that?´ These were ears cut off from the defeated enemy! I reported it to the commander, and he said: ´Well, this is a problem. The Germans should not have been here, if they hadn’t come here, they would have preserved both of their ears. If I issue a command to stop his practice, I will have a problem with my soldiers. If I don’t, I will have a problem with you. Today, you could have lived in peace in Czechoslovakia, and chase girls… so what shall we do about it? We will announce that they would get 30 centims for each captive. But he will have to have both ears. ´So we solved it this way, and it worked – for those guys, 30 centims was a lot of money, and the Germans were…Whether they cut the ears from a living or a dead, I don’t know. You can’t see that in midst of a battle. But it is their national custom. Quite interesting, but I would not want to fight against them.”

“It’s been almost sixty years ago, any you know, I think we should have started fighting, I am convinced of that. There would have been bloodshed, we would have been bombed, but there would not have been so many lives lost as they have been… Just what Dukla has cost – 7500 lives, in Great Britain – 560 airmen, how many dead in the Middle East, in Dunkerque, in the concentration camps… And the nation would have kept its head straight. And probably we would not have had to go through the fifty-year period of communist brainwashing.”

“When I returned home, I was a commander of staff of the 13th tank brigade in Olomouc. And one day a farmer with a little girl comes to my office. And he says that a member of our unit had raped her. Our boys never did things like that, so I thought, this cannot be. But eventually the girl confessed that he spoke Russian. So we immediately went to the next-door barracks, where we were welcomed by a fatty major of the Red Army with shaved eyebrows and soaked in terrible-smelling perfume, and when I told him what happened, he smashed his fist against the table and said: ´This is defamation of the Red Army.´ And he called the whole unit and three times he asked: ´Who raped that girl?´ Nobody raised a hand. With a victorious smile he tells the girl: ´Show him to me, then.´ And the girl went and pointed at a soldier in the third row: ´That one.´ The major called him and asked: ´Have you done it?´ He said: ´I have.´ And the commander pulled out a revolver and shot him. For me, this was the end of my military career, because - ´With Soviet Union for times eternal and never otherwise.´ or ´Soviet Union – our model´ - and was I to shoot my own soldiers?”

“My name is Moravec, I am 90 years old and I was a lieutenant of the 9th dragoon regiment in Vysoké Mýto. The first time I was wounded was during the mobilization near České Heřmanice near Varnsdorf. And then abroad… I worked for the Obrana Národa (Defence of Nation) resistance group as a link between the Škoda factory and Prague, and when this link was revealed, I crossed the borders to Slovakia and then I got to Budapest. And at the time I came there, the entire Czechoslovak mission by the French consulate was just closed. And about a hundred of our people were gathered at this consulate, and naturally they spoke neither Hungarian or French… And the French consul was very angry, saying that he would chase those damned Czechoslovaks out of there. And a lieutenant colonel… I forgot his name, came there, a French military attaché, and he asked whether somebody there could speak French. And someone said: ´Bob Moravec speaks French,´ so he put me in charge of it all. And when I was leaving, I was carrying about 50,000 in foreign exchange, and my friend, Šimandl, who went with me, had two bags of silver ten-mark coins. So we put all this money into it, and during 24 hours, or, well, maybe it took three days, we got all those people from Hungary to Yugoslavia.”

“We went there for reconnaissance. But we did not know the place was fortified. And when we got to the top, fire opened against us, a grenade exploded behind me, and I got hit it my back. One splinter bounced back from a rock and hit my left knee, that was not serious, but another also hit my back. I fell down and lay there unconscious, actually I have not lost consciousness, I could hear everything, but I could not move. My nerves were damaged. They carried me down and the doctor there declared me dead. They put me in a tent with corpses and pulled some sheet over me. At that moment entered the American officers who have just finished construction of a field hospital in Oran, which was to serve as a main dressing station and medical centre for all the soldiers fighting in Italy. And they came in and asked whether they could see this place, too, and one young doctor asked to see also the tent with the dead. I was lying just at the entrance, and he pulled off the sheet, looked at me and exclaimed: ´Jesus Christ, this guy is alive!´ He asked whether he could take me. And my commander told him: ´No problem, just take him.´ So they loaded me into a plane and transported me to Oran, where I was the only patient and 16 stunningly beautiful American nurses were taking care of me.”