“In the pub in Frankfurt, which we frequented, they had a Czech band. There were four of them or so, and they played there. When we arrived, they started playing Czech songs, and the other guests joined in and sang the melody with us as la-la-la. There in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf at the western end of Germany, we didn’t feel they bore a special grudge against us Czechs, that they’d want to follow us and bully us. That only happened to us when we returned to Teplice, that is, to the Sudetes. The waiter threw us out of the pub there because we’d been speaking Czech together. [Q: Things were rougher for Czechs in the Sudetes than in Germany itself...] Certainly. For one, the Czech who stayed there had to ‘opt’ for Germans. Many of them also had to join the army because they were given German citizenship. That wasn’t our concern, but they didn’t let us speak Czech aloud in the pubs because they did mind. We also got different ration tickets there. They were halved and missing completely for some goods. For instance, we couldn’t get any coal for them. In Germany we could get coal for our tickets, but not so in Teplice. So what were we supposed to heat with...?”
“Baťa [the Czech shoe company - trans.] knew that there’d be forced labour, but it also knew that the forced labour wouldn’t apply to people working in Germany. So it transferred us to a German firm that had already been founded there. It had to supply all its goods to Germany to wholesalers, which was a loss in profits because before that Baťa had supplied everything to its own shops, so it had the retail profits as well. And it was losing profits like this. So the German firm was established by Baťa people, Germans. Those were Germans who had served Baťa for a long time, and they’d been in various places - some in Poland, others in Germany... so they founded a limited company, and we started working there.”
“[Q: Did you witness the Germans being expelled from Teplice?] Some young boys or people came along from inland, they had red bands on their arms with the letters RG. It was originally said that they were the ‘Revolutionary Guard’, but considering the way they behaved, we later called them the ‘Ransacking Guard’. It was a group of people who claimed to represent Czechoslovakia, and they were the most eager to force out the Germans who’d stayed there - all old people and children, because the young ones were away on the front. They started evicting them from flats, forcing them to take just what they could carry, and then they lined them up in a big column, which they drove on foot from Teplice all the way up to Cínovec and Germany. Those were disheartening pictures. We didn’t agree with that, but we couldn’t intervene, because we were part of the inhabitants of Teplice, and we weren’t affected only because we were Czechs. The expulsion was later termed the ‘wild expulsion’ - and I have to agree with that, it wasn’t fair.”
“So I returned to Dubí, where there was a big meeting, because the Soviets passed by our company coming in from Cínovec, around Dubí, and to Teplice. So there was a big meeting there, where I declared that I disagreed with the invasion and that I was quitting the Union of Soviet Friendship. And that I’d wait until Dubček returned. I didn’t quit the Party. But I wanted to wait until the return of Dubček, who had been dragged off to Moscow at the time. Some diligent comrades noted this into my cadre profile. But I was lucky that the director wasn’t so bloodthirsty, and he took that assessment out of the cadre file and destroyed it. Because I probably wouldn’t have been able to travel anywhere abroad with a note like that in my cadre file.”
“[Q: How was the attack on Heydrich reflected in German sentiments?] The assassination was only discussed [in Germany] in the newspapers around the date it happened and then for about two weeks afterwards. It wasn’t mentioned at all after that. It wasn’t the focus of any special attention of journalists there. They preferred local news and global events on the fronts. At the time the fighting had already started to mean something to the Germans. When they’d beaten Poland and France and England had declared war on them, they didn’t really see that as war. That came later. So the newspapers and the public didn’t bother about the Heydrich attack for long. [Q: So, were there any anti-Czech sentiments?] We didn’t feel that at all. Even though our German colleagues who were in the company with us knew we were Czechs. We didn’t feel anything negative from them. We were all employees of our company. I take it as one example that not everyone was a Nazi. They were in a Nazi state, so they kept in line with their mouth shut, so to say, but they didn’t show any Nazi initiative of their own.”
“In Germany... of course we had to speak German, and letters were signed Heil Hitler! That was a mandatory there. Our advantage lay in the fact that the Germans who previously held the office positions were summoned to fight on the front, and so they took those of us who could just about speak German and kicked us up from the warehouses to the offices. [Q: Were those Reich Germans who worked at Baťa?] Yes, and that was a big difference.”
“When the year 1968 came, we were to leave by plane on 21 August to a geological expedition in Algeria, but because the Ruskies came, we didn’t go. We didn’t go till towards the end of September. So I was at the facility in Dubí, with the geological survey. At some meeting there I declared that I don’t agree with [the invasion] and that I’m for Dubček, who was hauled off to the USSR, and that I’m waiting for him to return and that I’m quitting the Union of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship. Back then Stáňa was still director, and he had access to my profile dossier, and he had it open, I was sitting there, he read the report that I had quit the society of friends... and he said: ‘Well, man, you’ll never go anywhere again with that...’ And he scrapped the assessment, destroyed it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten out of the country at all, of course.”
“I went there a bit later, only the geophysicists and geologists went there in January 1958. I accompanied them from Teplice to Prague, and when the plane was leaving, Director Stáňa, who stood next to me, asked me: ‘You’d like to fly too, eh?’ I said: ‘If you gave me the permission, I’d rush off and jump on the plane right now.’ He said: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll go there as well.’ [Q: What attracted you to the option so much?] First, it was 1958 and I had a chance at going abroad, right. And such a distance, too. We didn’t learn about Vietnam at the grammar school. The word hadn’t existed. We learnt about French Indochina. So of course, for these reasons, I was greatly interested in going.”
Vladimír Nechyba was born on 5 March 1920 in Mladá Boleslav. His parents Anna and Vladimír danced ballet. When their son was born they settled down in Olomouc, where they co-founded the first Czech theatre that same year. Vladimír’s father became a respected cultural figure in the city. The witness attended grammar school, and in 1939 he began working at Baťa. At first he worked in the labour camp in Lutonin, then in Olomouc and in Zlín. In 1941 he avoided forced labour thanks to the possibility of working in Germany at a Baťa company called BEAG. In 1944, following air raids on Düsseldorf, the employees were transferred to Teplice, where Vladimír Nechyba experienced the disdainful approach of Teplice Germans, the liberation by the Red Army, and the sad events of the wild expulsion of German children and elderly people. In the 1950s he worked as a technician at a geological survey in Dubí, and he was a member of the Czechoslovak exploratory expedition to Vietnam, where he met his future wife Nhung. They married in 1963. In the years 1967 to 1983 he worked in Algeria - his longest stay there amounted to six years. In 1968 he put himself and his job by quitting the Union of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship and by voicing his disapproval of the occupation. He has two children with his wife Nhung; the couple lives in Prague.
