“The mine shaft was up on the hill, and when we came out, we could see the river valley spread out below. When you climb out from underground and see such a beautiful landscape - that’s something amazing. One time I stood there looking about after my shift, it was afternoon, and suddenly I saw a plane fly in. Not above us, but along the river in the valley - a Messerschmitt. It was about a year since the time I had flown Messerschmitts myself. And there I was, a prisoner just come out of the uranium mine, and I saw a Messerschmitt flying down below. It must have been one of my classmates because no one else flew Messerschmitts at the time.”
“We learnt air tactics. How to fly in threes, in fours, in twos. Colour codes and the names of planes. The pilots from England taught us all that the way they had actually experienced it in combat. How they’d escorted bombers, how they’d protected them, and so on. They taught us all that. So we’d know how to dodge, how to attack. The base rule for combat was to never fly straight for too long. Keep manoeuvring. And to always be aware of what was going on behind you. To see behind you. And friendship. That was another principle.”
“We also had some rude things in the leaflets. Is it all right if I use some rude words? Yes? So for instance: Gottwald’s wife was called Marta, she weighed about a hundred kilos, and there was a song: ‘Hoy, goosies, hoy, Gottwald gives us joy.’ And we added the line: ‘Hundred-tower Prague is glum, Marta has a big fat bum.’ Those were the kind of things we had prepared for those leaflets.”
“We drank water from the toilet. I’m not exaggerating. It’s the truth. It’s kind of disgusting, but just imagine all the people there, and they all had to listen to nature’s call. Both number one and number two... And apart from that you also needed to drink sometimes. There was nothing else to drink there. Just the water from the toilet. So you held a mess pot under the flush holes, and that’s how we collected the water we drank.”
Antonín Zelenka was born on 13 January 1927 in the town of Vladislav near Třebíč. His parents owned a small farm, his father also maintained a small wagon business and worked with horses and timber. During World War II Antonín Zelenka attended a grammar school in Pilsen, staying in the house of his uncle (his father’s brother). Towards the end of the war the occupying authorities assigned him to forced labour in a fire brigade at the Pilsen air field, at which time he experienced the bombing of Pilsen. In October 1945 he entered the Military Aviation Academy in Hradec Králové, which he completed in June 1948 at the rank of lieutenant. In October 1948 he was dismissed from the army after being deemed politically unreliable; he was then arrested in April 1949. He was interrogated and beaten by agents of the Defence Security Intelligence in Brno. In June 1949 he was convicted of seditious assembly. In 1949 to 1954 he was interned in labour camps in Jáchymov and Kladno. In spring 1954 he was released by amnesty. He then worked at Constructions Company in Opava until his retirement. After 1989 he was rehabilitated and promoted to the rank of colonel in retirement. Throughout his life he has been an active musician.
