“We used the salvaged explosives to destroy railroad tracks and roads. We were causing damage to bridges, telegraph poles and things like that. We were damaging the communication lines inside the state (the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia – ed.’s note)”
“There were bunkers spaced several kilometres apart in the rear behind the front line, and the villages Boskovice and Pohory belonged to that area. Three to six members of the militia (Volksturm – ed.’s note) were in each of these bunkers. They had weapons and ammunition there. If there was some disorder (they were to take care of it). The Volksturm were soldiers from WWI, guys who were sixty or sixty-five years old. They were Germans who walked hand in hand with Hitler. We would always go there to poke fun of them. They would come and we would shout back: ‘Wie viel sind Sie?’ – How many of you are there. There would be two, three or four of us, for example, but we would say: ‘Dreiβig.’ – Thirty. ‘Nicht schieβen, bitte, bitte.’ You need to realize that this was almost the end of the war, in October and November 1944. We knew that they were old geezers. We were twenty and they were sixty or sixty-five.”
“The other of our activities was participating in paradropping of weapons. In January and February 1945, American airplanes were airdropping weapons and similar things for us. Our group was tasked with guarding the perimeter of the airdrop area. Other people from the partisan group – people from villages in the Drahanská Highland where the weapons were being dropped – were going to collect them. We were watching the area so that it would be possible to collect the things from there.”
Oldřich Vladař was born May 16, 1925 in Boskovice. He came from a working-class family and his father worked as a foreman in a factory. Oldřich studied a trade academy in Brno. Both his parents had died before he graduated. He passed the graduation examination in 1944 and he began working as an accountant in a shop in Boskovice. From 1944 he and his colleagues joined the resistance group VELA which was led by captain Josef Dřímalka. Three young men under the leadership of the former sapper Heřman Hrubý were conducting acts of sabotage in the vicinity of the town and they were using explosives to destroy railroad tracks, bridges and telegraph poles. Oldřich received a decoration for this activity in May 1945. After the war he joined the army and in 1945-1946 he studied at and graduated from the Military Academy in Hranice. He then worked as a teacher in military schools and from the mid-1950s as a lecturer at military departments of various universities, the longest time of which he spent at the military department of the Medical Faculty of the Palacký University in Olomouc. In 1959-1965 he did a distance course at the University of Economics in Prague and he was awarded the master’s (Ing.) degree.
