Karel Pfeiffer

"The day before my interrogation, I received a package from my uncle, sent by my father from West Germany. There was one Swiss medicine in the package, which some neighbours from the street asked me to get sent. I didn't want to, but they persuaded me that they needed him for their 17-year-old son. He is said to have ridden a motorcycle without a shirt, and if he does not have the medicine, he will die. So I suddenly found myself in a situation where if I didn't get the medicine, he would die! And everyone would say I could have saved him, and I didn't." - "And what happened to him?" - "I don't know. I knew him, but he never said 'hello' to me, we walked pass each other like strangers, his name was Havrda. So that's how they got the medicine from me, well I was just a kid. So I got the medicine and you can't imagine what a fuss it was about the police. A cure from Switzerland! That was completely anti-state! I don't even know what happened to him, whether the boy got him or not. It was as if I had done something terrible, that I had medicine from Switzerland in my stuff."

"As an eight-year-old boy, I already knew what the Russians were like. Then, when I went to school, specifically to the ninth grade, it was Stalin´s birthday, I was in charge of children's magazines and I had to post them around the class. So I got a magazine where Stalin was on the front page, and I painted Stalin over Hitler, painted a swastika on his hand, and wrote 'Mein Kampf' on the book. My friend, who was terribly into communism, he saw it and was angry with me: 'What did you do? This is just so terrible! This goes to the principal and to the Communist Party immediately!´ There was a school break, and a classmate came up to me and said, 'Look, I took it out of his pocket, burn it up fast,' and gave it to me. So I took the object and threw it in the stove. He had nothing, but then the times were such that the statement of the little boy was enough for the Communists to trust him. He didn't have to actually prove anything. I allegedly got into high school at the time, but when the holidays began, I received such a nice letter that the regional school board decided that I was not admitted to the second-grade school."

"I was on the balcony on May 5 when I learned that the war was over. Everything around us was blooming. Grandmother and grandfather were looking for some fabrics to sew the Czechoslovak flag. We didn't have any. Not just us, but all the people were sewing. Everyone was afraid to keep hiding the flag. We came where I went to school, we were standing directly opposite the school on the sidewalk, there were a lot of people everywhere and one tank after another was driving past, all the Russian equipment. Mom said how tired the soldiers were. Suddenly, a Russian soldier jumped out of a tank, lunged at my four-year-old brother, took him in his arms, threw him up, stood up carefully, and ran back again. Then it was about May 14 or so, when my dad suddenly appeared in the garden. It was a great joy. I also have a photo – our uncle took the picture right away. I wanted to tell Dad in German that a twin-engine plane landed not far from us that day. It was the first time I had seen a plane, and I wanted to tell him the discovery. But suddenly everyone said, 'You can't speak German! Don't speak German at all! No one today can imagine that at that time everything that was German or German-related aroused such enormous hatred. One cannot imagine greater hatred, such great hatred against all things German.”

"I woke up in the morning, my mother was doing something, she was making me up, she dressed me in three shirts, two coats, and I wondered why she was doing it. She said we go a long way and can only take twenty kilos. We took everything we could. I was small, but I remember this. Then we walked along the railway line, as was the case then. We reached the stop and reached Gelnice, where an unknown person took a picture of us in the square. I have a photo; I'll show you here. There was an assembly, military trucks and German soldiers organized the boarding. There were buses, and I thought we were going to take a bus. But my mother explained to me that one bus is for mothers with infants and the other for the Hitlerjugend, and that I might go. I was looking forward to it a bit, but I was more afraid that I would be separated from my mother, because I didn't know much German. I only spoke German when we came to my grandmother's in Švedlár. German was spoken there. We did not speak German at home, only Czech or Slovak there. In the end, my mother insisted that I went with her and my brother. We went all day, all the way to Zakopane."

"He learned he would be escorted alone with the escort, and the exact day and an hour. Thanks to that message, we were able to wait at the station for him to leave. They told him that he would go handcuffed, but my father was terribly angry, he laid him down on the bed and said they better shoot him, but he didn't want to be in handcuffs in front of his children. He begged them not to handcuff him, and said that when he was on the train, they should handcuff him, for example, not in front of their children. So, the soldier who escorted him took the handcuffs from him, even though he had orders to leave them on. He told Dad that if he ran away, he would have a lot of hard time so he better not run away. Thanks to that, we were able to say goodbye to our father. My brother remembers that more than I do. The brother remembered forever how Dad was leaned out of the train from the window and waved to us."