“I know that when the police came to arrest him in Malá Skála, he was at Labská bouda in Krkonoše and friends went to warn him. Witnesses told me. All the roads from Malá Skála were closed and guarded to make sure he wouldn’t escape. They wouldn’t even let my mother go out so she could go to the post office and send a telegram. Still, two friends grabbed their skis, hopped on a train and went to warn him. But they missed him while on the way, and then Czech police arrested him. They took him to the police station in Špindlerův Mlýn, hinting that they might let him escape along the way. My father said: ‘I didn’t do anything. I’m expecting a family, just married – what could they do to me?’ There was something they could do, of course. He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for failing to report a crime. He was previously visited by a young ‘foreign soldier’ who was monitored by and working for the StB, and he offered him to flee to the West. Dad kicked him out. Then they did a home search; he was working at the barracks in Trutnov at the time and translating English radio communication rules for our army. Our newly risen army had no radio communication rules; he had the English manual and was translating it, and they turned this into an aggravating circumstance and another crime, you know – claiming that he kept classified material at home.”
“We went to the cinema with girls and a friend, and a Russian soldier shouted at us rudely. I replied in Russian because I remembered certain words from our Russian teacher Štika, and I shook fist at him. The street was basically impassable, with groups of Russians scattered all over the place. Then one of them came over and asked why I was shaking my fist. I said because he had been rude to us and shouted at us. Of course, a debate ensued with him claiming that nobody had shouted at us. He started tugging at my arm. I didn’t want to stand in the middle of the street so I walked aside. He tugged me towards the barracks. Then two of them grabbed me. I was taller than both of them, by about the height of my head, so I hit them with all my might and they fell off. Instead of running away, I stood waiting to see what happens. They thronged around me, pulled me into the barracks, but they didn’t even hit me. A discussion followed, and I kept telling them to speak Czech because I didn’t understand.”
"The Germans proceeded with increasing brutality. Nobody had anticipated that the terror launched by the Germans would reach this scale. From an international point of view, the assassination has certainly helped. It helped the Czechoslovak Republic and it supported the resistance in other countries. I believe that if the paratroopers had known what happen, they would have done it again. The later belittlement of our resistance was quite made up. The importance of the western resistance movement was being diminished and only the eastern resistance was being discussed. If we compare the two, there were actually not that many resistance groups from the east, and those which operated here were being deployed right in front of the advancing Red Army and were assigned to take over power and organize the National Committees. They were not engaged in intelligence activity."
"My life motto? I discovered how strongly attached to Malá Skála I was. When I was around twenty and I was contemplating emigration, the idea that I would not be able to come back here again was so intense that I decided to have my family here. It was obvious that I would not be able to make any career here. I concentrated on work and I didn’t mind manual work, either."
"When father suspected that he might be arrested, he buried the gun which he still had from the times of his deployment, under the raspberry bushes in our garden. He wrapped the gun in an oily rag, placed in it a can and buried it in the ground. He was searching for it after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, using an army metal detector. When they found the gun, it was already damaged because of the clay soil. The can had not been buried deep enough, and water had leaked into it. The can was damaged by corrosion and the oiled cloth could not protect the gun anymore. (…) Had I known about it, I would have unearthed it earlier."
"They stayed in touch through letter-writing. I believe that Franta Bartoš lived in Vienna, and one day they managed to travel there with a Čedok tour and they met in Vienna. The StB knew about their correspondence, naturally. This is proven by the fact that in the 1980s (probably in 1986) the Secret Police arrived to see my father, and among other things, they were asking him about the National Socialist Party in the exile. My father didn't even know that this party existed in the exile. But Antonín Bartoš was its member. (...)"
"We were reading poems aimed against the state. I still don't know whether the communists, the StB Secret Police, knew about it or not, because among us there were guys who worked as wardens in the Minkovice prison, too; at least I knew about one. Reading these poems would have been sufficient grounds for putting us behind the bars. There were forty or fifty people gathering there and sometimes we didn't even know everybody. We would come on Saturday evenings and on Sunday mornings, Slavoj would stand up on the billiards table and read out the poems to Franta. Most of them would win the 'Behind the Golden Bars' Contest (a term used jokingly for humour aimed against the state – transl.'s note).".
Čestmír Šikola Jr was born in Malá Skála on 22 May 1949. By then, his father Čestmír Šikola Sr had been serving his prison sentence. The communist regime took issue with him because he had been a member of the anti-Nazi resistance organised by the exile government in London during World War II. He fled for England in 1939 and became a member of the Clay paratrooper group that operated in the north-east of Moravia from 1944 on. Unlike his teammates Antonín Bartoš and Jiří Štokman, Čestmír Šikola Sr did not leave Czechoslovakia after the communist coup of 1948, not least because his wife was expecting a baby. After his release from prison, the family moved to Břasy in the Rokycany area in the 1950s. Thanks to the thaw of the 1960s, the witness’s father succeeded to complete his studies at the Institute of Chemical Technology (at his third attempt) and Čestmír Šikola Jr was admitted to the Czech Technical University despite his impaired ‘cadre profile’. He took part in student strikes in August 1968, and used to affix a black flag on rocky cliffs near Malá Skála along with friends from a humourist group to commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion. Having graduated, he worked at the ZPA factory in Trutnov where he met his wife Alena. They married in 1977 and had two sons. Through his friends, the witness encountered Charter 77 documents, which he kept at home and disseminated to other friends. Following the Velvet Revolution, he and his father took part in commemorative events related to the Clay sortie. They would also regularly visit the families of the other two paratroopers. The father died in 2008. Čestmír Šikola Jr lived in Malá Skála in 2022.
Sons of the Clay sortie members (left to right: Čestmír Šikola Jr., Michal Štokman, Antonín Bartoš Jr.) along with Bohumila Kouřilová whose mother used to help the paratroopers
Sons of the Clay sortie members (left to right: Čestmír Šikola Jr., Michal Štokman, Antonín Bartoš Jr.) along with Bohumila Kouřilová whose mother used to help the paratroopers
