Captain (ret.) Leo Österreicher

“I had my backpack and all the necessary stuff ready and we set out nearby Chust where I lived to Velatín into some shabby pub. There were some traffickers drinking some booze. With me was one sister who had already twice crossed the border illegally. She made an illegal border crossing of the Slovak-Moravian and Slovak-Hungarian frontier and she had gotten to Chust. They were fleeing with me to Romania. We waited there till eleven and then the leader of the group, a trafficker, said “let’s go”. We went in the light of the day not through the main entrance but out the back door to the mountains and after about two hours of marching we arrived at the border. The traffickers left and after about an hour they came back and said that we could go, that the way is cleared. We came into a village called Tarna Mare. I knew that village from before as I had spent a holiday there once. As we were crossing the road to the fields the dogs from the whole village started to bark so we ran to this trafficker as fast as we could. He said: “Relax, just undress and lie down, if someone comes you’re sleeping.”

“Well, and then we went all the way across France to Dunkirk, because Dunkirk is located in the far north, on the border to Belgium. We had plenty of work and no time for sleep since they kept commanding to deploy tanks everywhere, because digging yourself in is hard work and we didn’t know how the siege of Dunkirk would look like, yet. In the end, it went pretty good. Of course, a lot of people died there but it could have been much worse.”

“And with Klapálek. I got to know Klapálek. He was a highly intelligent officer, who had what it takes to lead such a mixed unit as was ours. Some in our unit came from the Soviet Union, some were from Yugoslavia, others came from Palestine and some again as far away as Australia. And he was this kind of a people’s person. He knew how to deal with people. And truly he gained people’s respect.”

“There was a concentration camp in Palestine, well, actually it wasn’t a concentration camp, rather a detention camp, where they held people. It was called Ašlind. And there were plenty of our people who claimed that they are patriots and that they wanted to fight the Germans but the English wouldn’t let them go. They were certainly Zionists. But they weren’t afraid so much of the Zionists as they were afraid of German agents. These must have been people who collaborated with the Gestapo or the SS in an inconvenient way. But the English must have gathered information on them, on their activities. They either revealed themselves somehow or they must have had a different source of intelligence that indicated to them that they’re collaborators.”

“So I got into this train. We got seated and tried not to speak too much in order not to reveal that we’re strangers. A Romanian conductor came and wanted to see the ticket. We showed him the ticket and he asked where we came from. So we told him we’re Czechs and he said it’s too dangerous for us to sit there. He took us to a first class carriage where he claimed nobody would check our passports. So we were seated in a red-velvet compartment. Every now and then he showed up and asked if we didn’t need anything. Eventually, he turned out to be a Ukrainian somewhere from the Bukovina. So we traveled without being bothered by anyone.”