Rudolf Schmidt

"At that time I was looking after a little gypsy who was in jail. And a guy like that, who was in jail, he had to do nasty, ugly jobs, like in the toilets and stuff. And the man who was in the guardhouse, he had to guard that man. And I was guarding this little gypsy, and he was always hanging around near my machine gun, until he must have reached his hand in there and it went off! It was such a terrible luck that the gypsy had his legs spread and the bullet went into the ground between his spread legs. I could have been in jail if that had happened. Then I'd have had an ugly nick. I don't know, I might not even be here anymore. All sorts of bad things have happened sometimes. I had to find a cartridge in the first place. It was quiet in the barracks, a truck was passing by at the moment, so you couldn't hear the shot. So, I didn't get hurt, and neither did the gypsy. I was very lucky."

"Well, for example, when they transfered us to the Stříbro. In Stříbro then - it was already close to the border, and moreover the western border! So then some of these military batches, some captain came to interrogate us a little bit. That was one or two of half German nationality of us, we were about three in the squad at that time. One squad was 12 guys. That's when they came to interrogate us to see if we would run away to the West, for example. Then we found out later that one soldier had actually gotten a gun of some kind, gotten some bullets, and wanted to escape. But he was of course caught not far from the barracks."