JUDr. Kuneš Sonntag

“When the priest’s speech was over, we sang the anthem Where is My Home. Somebody started and we all joined in. It was allowed to sing it, just like today. When we finished, a group of people began singing the Lightning over the Tatras. These people were Slovaks who have remained faithful to Prague and who did not go to study to their new state, to Bratislava. For me, it was a spark which made me aware that there were awfully many of us. We did not wait any longer and we went to Prague. Policemen came against us in an open-roof Aero 30 car.”

“It was terrible. I was advancing with the undefeated army. Trust me, the men were crying. So was I. We were slowly passing through, cannons and all the stuff was were being pulled behind. Eventually we arrived to Uničov. The town was already decorated. Hakenkreuz and flags everywhere. The Germans were standing there. I remember that as a Boy Scout, I had been a leader of three troops. Two of them were absolutely in the German borderland, in Uničov and Šternberk. Šumvald was one of the five villages which have remained Czech in this mass of the German.”

“They began taking us for interrogations. I was led to an office on the right. A long room, and there was a desk inside, with a globe on it. The globe was made of glass, it was lit, and you could turn it around. They shoved me in this room and Mr. Frank was standing there. He gave me a welcome, saying, that I was ´one of the instigators of Czech pseudo-intelligentsia,´ and he accused us of having contacts with the Jew Beneš and of attempting to take down the order established by the Führer for eternity, and that we would be shot in the morning.”

“If you remember, Moravec, who was a colonel, was also a legionnaire, and during the final years of the First Republic era he was always publishing his forecasts in the Lidové noviny paper under the penname Yester, and praising France and our alliance. Now imagine what it was like for a young man when we walked through that corridor (we tried to get out somehow at the back, which we eventually managed with Pečenka), and a German officer was walking there and this Moravec – wearing a uniform of a Czechoslovak army colonel – was also there. The officer saluted him and Moravec responded: ´Heil Hitler!´ You know, that was a shock.”

“At two o’clock at night they were screaming at us and rushing us through the main gate. Arbeit mach frei, you know. They made us stand in rows of five and they did a preliminary headcount. Right after that they made us run to the apelplatz, to form a semi-circle, right in front of those barracks. There we already had to stay in orderly rows of five. It was already organized by prisoners there. Kapos? No, they were called camp elders. In Sachsenhausen, the word kapo was not used at all.”