Josef Tomášek

“I can still remember that the Nazis searched every flat in Libeň. Two SA officers, Brownshirts went together, two of them came to a room where I and my brother were sleeping and one was standing over us. My father had to show the other one around the flat (to show) that nobody was hiding there. I remember that the SA man who was guarding us behaved himself. He was making funny faces, wearing glasses, and was winking at us. He was making us calm this way, it was probably a decent person even though he was a member of the storm troop.”

“(I joined) right after the war when (the troop) on Libeňský Island was founded. There was troop number twenty-five, a Pepijá was the leader and also Míla Vlk and Rakša. Rakša was the leader of us, cub scouts; Míla Vlk was the leader of the 253rd troop with which I used to go to camps. I attended it until the end, I think that it survived until 1951. The Czech Union of Youth took our clubroom. We used to go there at night and knock on the doors and shout at them to get lost and that it wasn´t theirs. But we had to run away every time because communists were already in the saddle...”

“The whole Vinohradská Street was full of demonstrating people, we were going down the street. A swarm of Russian soldiers was walking against us with machine guns pointing up. We were walking against them as if we were going to break it through but they were walking against us with the machine guns, they started shooting in the air, trolley wires started to fall on us, they cut the wires by shooting. They were falling on us. Fortunately, I do not know that someone stayed there, but we had to disperse the crowd. It was dangerous there.”

“Then I was in Cetviny, it was a company behind the wires on Austrian borders which were busier than the borders with Germany. They were guarded so thoroughly that nobody dared to go there. Unfortunately, I helped a man and a woman who had been electrocuted. As the alarm group, we ran past the wires, because a short circuit had been reported. Fortunately, the discharge threw them off the wires, off the conductor. I talked to them, they were from Ostrava, they then took them to interrogation. I do not know what happened with them after it.”