Colonel Čestmír Smolka

“We were in Zlín. Or Vsetín, I can’t remember. We set off through a forest; we were nearing a road when some Germans drove by in a truck. We met them all of a sudden. Suddenly, us and them. Well, so we started shooting, they jumped off their cars and returned fire. Well, we started to run and they followed suit. There weren’t any dead on our side, I don’t know about them, because we legged it. We didn’t wait for them to get more help or something of the like. We clashed on the road, that’s it. We were on our way on some mission, and they drove up by car. By truck. I don’t know where they were headed or what, they just drove up. We knew they were Germans, so we started shooting. There were lots of firefights like that. You’d come upon someone all the time. Even traitors, when they were Czechoslovaks. Many firefights... but not organised or something. They were random, we didn’t do prepared shoot-outs. All the shooting was by chance. We saw some Germans, we saw, I don’t know, some SS men or the like, so we started shooting at them. Without any prior preparation.”

“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.”