Colonel Čestmír Smolka

“When I came home, I joined the resistance. That was in 1944. Because my brother also led a resistance group in Moravian Wallachia, and now I can’t seem to remember... Foothills [Záhoří in Czech - transl.] it was called, I think. Yeah, Foothills. So to start with I was in the Foothills group, and while there I heard of the Jan Žižka partisan brigade. I was in Petr Moskalenko’s unit during the war. Well, and Petr Moskalenko’s unit was affiliated with us to such a degree that, say, explosive weapons and the such, that was stored in our house. Unfortunately, later on, it exploded with all that was in it. Including my mother, my brother and sisters - the house blew up. Well, but as I said, I was in Petr Moskalenko’s unit. Well, and Petr Moskalenko’s unit took part in all operations of this kind. Blowing up outposts, I don’t know, raiding gendarme stations, exploding trains. We did all that, depending on the situation. To start with what the brigade did, you wanted to get as much information about the Germans, the SS and the police that were there. And we also wanted to know what they do, where they go, what they’re interested in the most. We collected various kinds of ammunition, collected various weapons. All that was done illegally, in secret. Those were the methods and options of people, they way it was during the war. There wasn’t any organising being done, as in, you do this today. Things went just the way the world was, the way the war was. We got weapons and explosives by raiding our gendarme stations. And also when the boys were gamekeepers and so on, they had weapons. You could always fiddle your way to some weapons. So there was never a lack of that. For example, you see here, that’s me with a gun, and these are my colleagues, and these are all guns.”

“My brother worked in the home resistance, and our house served as a munitions depot for the units. Both for the brigade and for others. Our house stored weapons designated for combat. And when my brother was preparing to blow up some train, he did that at home together with two or three other people, and as he was preparing it, by a stroke of bad luck he dropped the grenade, and all the ammunition and all the things we had stored there for the Jan Žižka brigade, it exploded. Everyone there was killed. My sister, brother, mother, and three other people died there. There was room upstairs, a lady lived there with one man, a married couple in fact. The Homers. She was there in the broken house, when it blew up; and Mr Homer, he was employed at the railway in Krásná. And when he came home, he saw the house was destroyed, he saw the way things were, so he turned to leg it, and the Germans shot him. They took him to Valašské Meziříčí, threw him out by a fence somewhere, and come morning he was dead.”