“All those things I have seen, the fighting I have gone through. I would like to live at least until I’m ninety years old, after I had to spend my youth in such terrible conditions sacrificing so much. My nerves were such a mess at the end of the war and even for a long time afterwards. If I had stayed in Yugoslavia, I would have gone crazy. I was almost crazy already. In particular when there was a loud bang - I would always shake like crazy… I am really glad that even today there are some good people around.”
“My brother came back home after a while. It was just a short way across the road. His head was bleeding and he also complained about severe pain in his chest. He told me: ‘Ruda, they put my chest in iron chains, gradually tightened it and thereby crushed my chest. I’m in a terrible pain.’ He had to see a doctor but afterwards he somehow recovered.”
“They didn’t hit him either way. I let him go when I saw that he was running away. Those who stayed there hurt him. Eventually, he turned out to be the brother of one of the partisans, him being one of the Ustashi while his brother was a partisan.”
“One of them told me: ‘What have you got here? Who cut your hair like this?’ I said: ‘What do you mean?‘ He pointed to my cap and it looked as if someone cut a hole in it with a pair of scissors. It was from a shrapnel. It even cut away a part of my hair with it. It was very close – if the shrapnel had flown an inch lower I wouldn’t be here now.”
Rudolf Parobek was born in 1926 in the small town of Jakšić which is located in Požega-Slavonia County in present-day Croatia. At the time this region belonged to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes where his Czech grandparents moved with the promise of freely available land and other kinds of economic relief. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of the region were persecuted by the Ustashi and the Germans. His brother Adolf was arrested and tortured. That is why Rudolf Parobek decided to join the Partisans. He became a soldier of the 12th Assault Division of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia, as did many other Czechs. He went through heavy fighting and was seriously wounded. He was demobilized in February 1946 after he had been released from the hospital. In December of the same year he and his sister left for the native land of their ancestors for good. In the present, he lives with his wife in Náměšť na Hané.
