Colonel Evžen Slezák

“I illegally left Czechoslovakia on July 1st, 1939. I left for Bratislava and I managed to get on board of a propeller ship and we went down the Danube. And I got that way as far as Sulina. It is the estuary of the Danube. And there I got on the ship that was some kind of an owler. And I simply under the ship... They were extremely good sailors. So we got through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria. And we were imprisoned everywhere for about a fortnight. And we arrived to former Palestine in 1939. And the English captured us there and they put us in some kind of a concentration camp in Sarafand. And we stayed there for about a month until everything was settled. So they gave us twenty piasters and let us go.”

“The ship's name was Noemi Julia. And because she was an owler, we tied the captain and put him into the roundhouse so that he was not taken into custody. Well, all in all it was very complicated. But really. The captain was very polite. They had some sausages there and we were stood there to guide them, so we guided them. But we always cut the sausages and put a bit longer string there instead. So they had no idea... But it was an experience to me that they played the song ‘Škoda lásky’ for us in Liverpool. And it was beautiful. And then they translated it into English, ‘The roll out the barrel.’”

“It was simply very hard for us because we were issued with half a liter of water a day. And we swam – there was an English shipwreck in Tobruk – to fetch some lemonades. And there was a gentleman, Griment. With the Germans. Because we swam there and so did they. But we really had... it was our life because otherwise we couldn't, it was the worst thing to be without water. And they fought at night and there were a kind of barricades of tins with ‘corned beef.’ And we used to amuse ourselves during the day by shooting into it. When we defeated the Germans and when we left Tobruk, we started a journey to England in Suez in 1943. And it was our last African anabasis.

“And when I came on May 5th I heard the bells ringing. I popped in a pub and I asked: ‘What is going on?’ (What's going on out there?) Because I was given the command to fetch the munition so I went to Lille. And don't wish you to see the cannonade, we used all the munition up in 1945. And one more thing. When we were commanded to pack up, there we were three mechanics in a motor battalion. Well, we simply started as we were ready for a desert war. And at that moment we had to tighten belts, we had to change reflectors. It means we had to get ready for a journey home.”