PhDr. Jan Orlický

“In Germany in a mountain chain Harz we had been building a narrow gauge railway. There I have experienced an extreme hunger, which I would not wish to anybody. All the day my mind was completely overwhelmed by thoughts on food. I got one small loaf of bread for the whole week. I outlined six lines across it and each day I could eat only one slice. I followed this rule strictly, but every time I cut off a slice I thought the cutting was too bulging. So I took my knife and leveled ‘the bulge’. I get so used to this manner during these few months in Harz, that six more months I had a compulsion for the same practice anytime I was cutting bread.”

„I can’t say there was no fighting in Dejvice, but only one side waged the fight. Lot of German flats were all around. If someone shot at you through a chink, the whole street resounded with the shot, so it was absolutely impossible to find the shooter. Once I was guarding a barricade and just few centimeters wide from my hand the barricade was hit by a bullet. I experienced an internment as well. The case was one Russian woman working for Germans. When we had captured her she refused to be cut, which we usually did. She defended herself she was a Russian. In nearby house I learned she was a mistress of one SS-man. I took her to her home and started searching the room. Suddenly I spoke to her in Russian. She became to shake, when I told her I knew her past. We interned her and wrote a report about her. But finally, when Russian army arrived, she successfully hoodwinked one of the Russian commanders with the same story and got away.”

“At the beginning of March we decided to sneak away because of rapidly approaching frontline. We heard the artillery shelling already. We took a train which was completely overcrowded. There remained no free space even on the roof. Finally I found one unoccupied buffer between two wagons. I was leaving despite my wounded severed muscle. I hurt my leg during unloading rails. When we arrived to Leipzig the city was bombed to dust. With other travelers we hobbled trough the streets and took another train. Guards were searching the crowd at railway stations, but in chaos of those days we passed without problems. In Dresden the situation was even worse. Only ruins of destroyed houses loomed all around the railway station.”

„The only preparations we made for an uprising was the sewing of Czechoslovakian, American, British and Soviet flags from all possible sheets we find. Then we were just waiting when it comes out into open. When radio broadcasted: ‘we are no more broadcasting in German, the Germans are closing in on us, help us, help us...,’ my mother made a phone call to our relatives who lived in Vinohrady. When she asked what the situation was over there, they answered: ‘quite good, all houses are covered with flags’. We decided to hang out our flags immediately. As we started some German soldier shoot at us. But our balcony was build from bricks so we cowered ourselves and hanged out the flags regardless the shooting. The shooting quickly ceased, because the street was suddenly covered with flags.”