“Then came April 19th, 1945. In the evening we heard shooting from rifles and machine-guns. Only later we learnt that it was volkssturm defending itself. But how they could defend themselves with rifles against a well-armed army, I don’t know. On the twentieth we were in our cell and suddenly we heard somebody speaking in Polish: ‘Amerikanci, Amerikanci.’ Some Polish people were shouting there. We thus ran to the windows and there were two Allied soldiers standing there. I don’t know whether they were British, American or Canadian. They were the Allies. The prison exploded in that moment. We all shouted, screamed, clapped our hands, banged on the doors, and hugged each other. You cannot imagine the noise. We all knew that we were reborn and that we would finally live.”
“Only when I was coming home, somebody called at me, somebody recognized me. I came to our house from the back. My mom remained standing there in shock. She didn’t speak much, nor did I; she was just patting me and crying. My father came because somebody had told him. He only said: ‘I knew that you would come back.’ Mom had only one question: ‘What would you like to have for lunch?’ I wanted potato pancakes; we called them ‘stryks’. And so I got them.”
“I was arrested together with another fellow fighter by the Gestapo on September 8th. You can imagine what such arrests looked like: we were beaten. They knew everything from those two guys who were unaware that they mistakenly trusted Kohutek. They pressed me to tell them when I was to meet Čapka. I told them that we had planned to meet, but I gave them a false date. Later I found out that Čapka knew that something was happening, and he didn’t come to the scheduled meeting.”
Slavoj Posker was born June 22, 1924 in Orlová-Kopaniny. His father owned a general store, and his mother was a housewife. Although he grew up in a region where Polish dialect was spoken, the family spoke strictly Czech at home. When Orlová became occupied by the Polish in 1938, his parents sent him to his relatives in Ostrava so that he would be able to attend a Czech school. Slavoj joined a resistance group whose members wanted to go to support the Slovak National Uprising, but the Gestapo learnt about it and Slavoj was arrested on September 8, 1944. After interrogation in Ostrava he was taken by train together with his fellow prisoners to Dresden on January 10. He survived the bombardment while in the prison there. After the air raid he walked with other prisoners to the prison in Meissen. He had to search for unexploded ordnance there. On April 19, 1945 he was liberated by the Allied armies. In 1950 he graduated from Charles University and he became a lecturer at the Technical University of Mining in Ostrava. He joined the Communist Party, but he was expelled from the Party when he voiced his disagreement with the arrival of the Soviet army in 1968. The regime forbade him to teach and to complete his thesis for the Candidate of Sciences degree. Slavoj received help from the basketball team in the ironworks company Nová Huť at that time, when they offered him a job as a coach and gave him a chance to translate materials on sports from English. Slavoj Posker received his associate professor’s degree only after 1989 when he was already retired.
