"Colonel Kozák, he offered me Hranice. Not only me but eight other guys from Břevnov, the fighting unit we were in. [And what was the arrival in Hranice like?] They brought us to the station and each of us had a suitcase in his hand. So they loaded it on the car and we marched through the town of Hranice in two-meter intervals. Well, you couldn't really call it marching as we weren't trained, yet. We came to the main gate, which is still there, through the gate to the first courtyard. There were tables and there was the artillery, infantry, tank troops, signalmen and engineers. We went to the appropriate table and looked if we were on the list. The sergeant led us away. In the evening we dressed and at six o'clock in the evening we learned that we had just entered the first year of the military academy."
"I was deployed at Benátky in Dražice working at a power plant. Archbishop Beran helped me to get there. [How?] When my teachers found out that I was supposed to be sent to forced labour, they contacted him and he arranged it. He told me: 'They will never find you there'. So I went outside of Prague."
"My horse fell somehow sick, so I found myself a mare called 'Něva' there. I took it there and we went out for a ride. He told me: 'Šimek, what is this? It's supposed to go to the butcher'. I said: 'that's all that was there'. Then we went galloping and Něva took over his horse as if it was standing on the spot. Then I rode back, Něva went along the wall and the more I pulled it, the faster it flew. So he said: 'where did you get that horse?' And I said: 'Well, it just stood there so I took it. Later, Něva took part in the Velká-Pardubická horse race. So I saved it from the butcher."
"There [an SS-man] punched one prisoner. Alexei came to him, grabbed him under the chin, lifted him up, shook him up a little bit and then released him again. The SS-man didn't react to it at all and left him alone. Then came the Hitlerjugend and it got really dangerous because those guys were crazy. And finally came the Volksturm. I said that if the inspection came they'd go mad. Because one Russian prisoner walked ahead and carried the rifle for the German. Of course it wasn't loaded. And at the rear there walked another prisoner and carried a rifle too."
"I was sent out to the units of General Vlasov (so-called 'Vlasovci') in Košíře. I was supposed to negotiate with them the handover of their guns. There was some shooting, I didn't understand it. Suddenly something exploded near the Košíře hospital. The Lieutenant fell to the ground and said: 'that was a grenade.' If it was a grenade or not – I didn't know that. So we went to the Vlasovci and we found them. It was not a proper unit. They walked along the road, each of them holding a machine gun and a haversack. They had an ammunition clip in it and some bread. That was all they had."
Jiří Šimek, a retired colonel, was born on October 10, 1926 in Příbram. In 1932, his family moved to Prague, where he attended elementary school and later secondary school. However, he was only allowed to graduate from secondary school after the war. During the war, he was sent to forced labour at a power plant in Dražice, where – among other things – he was in charge of Soviet prisoners. On 4 May, 1945, he returned to Prague and participated in the Prague uprising. After the war, he joined the Military Academy in Hranice, where he was assigned to the artillery. He became the first officer of the battery and after his graduation he served in the 203rd anti-tank brigade in Příbram. He then became the commander of the reconnaissance squadron of the artillery regiment. He refused to join the Communist Party and during the Prague Spring of 1968, he participated in forming the Club of Committed Non-Partisans, which was the reason for his dismissal from the army. At that time, he began working as a planner in the Fotografia association. After the Velvet Revolution, he returned to the military as the deputy commander for training and education and worked mainly in Slovakia. He currently lives in Prague.
