Vojtěch Strauss

“My eldest uncle; I have not seen him alive, he was thirty-five and he had died before I was born. That was because they drafted men below the age of thirty. They arrived to him and questioned him how come that he was not doing anything. Men in leather coats arrived in a roofless car when he was cutting wood. Since he was a communist, somebody turned him in and they arrested him and took him away. Nobody knew about him. Only in the last year before the war ended, two guys from Slovakia arrived and he had been with the partisans and he had been shot to death. They brought us his ‘ausweis,’ something like an identity card, and a map. There were bullet holes in it. They gave it to us and they left. They did not say anything. Meaning that he had been buried there.”

“One day we went to change shifts and there was no car. And so they assigned us an armoured four-wheeled vehicle, which was nicknamed Fuk. We were not able to drive up the Jáchymov Hill. We thus had to return to Ostrov and take the back route via Merklín and the other place. Snow began falling and the car had small windows like this, and I was sitting up there and sweeping the snow from the windows. We arrived up there and a deer jumped in front of the car and as we had our headlights on, it was staring at us. I said: ‘Quickly, pass me the…’ He asked: ‘What do you want?’ I said: ‘The submachine gun, you blockhead!’ Before I could load it, the deer jumped away and he was gone.”