Petr Rolenec

"We used to go to the pub in Mimoň, as reserve officers we could go as we wanted, only we had to be at work in the morning and otherwise we could do anything. We came home at eleven from the pub. And the unit supervisor said, 'Guys, something's going on. There's an order for all officers to report to the unit immediately.' That's strange, in the middle of the night. The liason officers had to go out in the cars and get them all together. Then another order came: to call off all the guards. And by that time we'd already caught the radio broadcast, at two in the morning. Jesus Christ, it started. Call off all the guards, and now, of course, the airport was huge. The guys were there at different stations at the beginning, at the end of the runway. [We] couldn't call off everybody. Somewhere around two o'clock all of a sudden there was crazy shooting. Then it died down. After a while - because they had to be on duty all night in the tower in case something happened - the guys from the tower came in running and said, 'Jesus Christ, some Russians landed here, drove us out of the tower with machine guns and immediately took over the tower!' After a while we heard the transport planes coming in, and they [the Russians] were organizing it from the tower. The shooting had been because this ground unit that was occupying the airfield - when you go from Mimoň to Doksy, there is an airfield up to the road, there were fences and barriers - and there was our guard there too. All of a sudden, cars came roaring, cars were rushing, they broke the fences, the soldiers didn't know what was happening, they started shooting, using machine guns. Fortunately, nothing happened. So they came back to the barracks about three quarters of an hour later,they were shitting it, pardon me, and told the story. This unit completely occupied the airfield, they had had everything ready. The tower specialists, the artillery, who immediately secured the runway, manned the area with guns and floodlights. And that very night planes started landing there one after another."

"The expulsion from Smržovka - I don't remember it much. All I know is that every time the relatives came, they were crying at our place that the date was set for them. I didn't experience a wild expulsion, I don't know whether there was anyone in Dolní Smržovka who was being driven away in June 1945. I don't know. Because it was clear that mixed marriages were not going to be displaced and that our family was not going to be expulsed, they brought valuables to us. My father was nervous about it, so they made a wall partition in the attic and there was a hole behind a wardrobe, and that's where you could climb and put the things. Then when it became possible for the Germans to arrive here, sometime between 1959 and 1960, they would come and get it. My dad was always a bundle of nerves, he said, if they find it at the border they'll arrest me here. You mustn´t say where you got it from, no way you can say something like that. That's how they were picking up the valuables again."

"So Dad was in prison, they had come for him. At that time Tanvald was a judicial district and there was a prison there, so they arrested him. My mother used to bring him food there, as a German she had to wear a white armband. You probably know that. Because they hardly gave them anything to eat. Then somehow she contacted the sensible Czechs, and they somehow got my father released. But in the meantime, the looting guard came to us." - "Do you mean the Revolutionary Guard, officially?" - "Yes, with RG armbands. Even back then we called them the Looting Guard." - "Many looted, you're right." - "My mother and two small children [were at home], so they cleaned out the house."

"Then the war started and the British had already managed to bomb Berlin. So in Berlin, the Germans had a very specialised research institute, which was dealt with developing television. The Germans were already television broadcasting at the 1936 Olympics. And then they were making remote control systems there, these were such important things for the army that they moved this manufacturing to our old factory, which is know as the Monastery." - "To Smržovka or to Tanvald?" - "That's in Dolní Smržovka. That was the Priebsch company, the biggest spinning mill during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so they moved everything out and set up this research facility. My dad worked mostly for them, and then he also [made] furniture, people weren´t building that much anymore. He saw interesting things there, he didn't understand it, of course. There was an interesting system in that factory. When you went to work, you had to pin on a badge and you had access to certain rooms in the factory according to the colour combination of the badge. My dad had a universal one, he used to go and paint partition walls, every now and then. Sometime in 1940 he saw a television for the first time, he couldn't get it straigh in his head at the time. There was a car driving around Smržovka, he was sitting with the developers, they had a TV set, and he saw this car driving around Smržovka and broadcasting to the TV set. Then they were developing remote-controlled tanks, which were called Goliaths. Then they had wire-guided anti-tank missiles."