Aleksander Sola

The radio station had to be placed on the line between the Polish TV transmitter and the town where you wanted to listen. The boys would set up the aerial in the evening and put the cassette on. It was a five-minute programme, it could not be longer for fear of blowing the cover. At first we would broadcast during the Evening News programme. The picture on the TV would go away, the "Prząśniczka" tune would play followed by the message: "This is Radio Solidarity". Then the recording and this was it. The boys would tear down the equipment and quickly move away.

On the afternoon of 16 December, on my way home from work, I went to the basement to dismantle some engines. It was getting dark early, it was maybe five in the afternoon, but it was dark. Four guys with long rifles walk in on me. They say: "Come with us". I raised my hands in dripping with oil: "I’m not going anywhere like this. I have to change”. Two of them escorted me into the house, I changed my clothes. The Black Maria was parked outside the window. They threw me inside. I was taken to the Commune Office, where this military commissar had his office. The militia station was there. I learned from my neighbours that there had been another four armed men outside the building. This army was sent to pick up one calm man who never hurt anybody.

My father was ordered to take some potatoes by a horse-drawn carriage from Chodel to the ghetto. There were no good roads, they were sandy, so he could not load much on his cart. He arrived in Poniatowa and they opened the gate. He drives through the ghetto - a Jew came out from behind a corner. He was a friend of my father's from the primary school. And he says: "Józek, can I have a couple of potatoes?". Father says "Sure!" My father drives on and the Jew walks beside him. He had a hole torn in his coat and he would throw potatoes behind the lining. A Ukrainian guard came out from behind another corner. He stopped them and says to the Jew: "Take out the potatoes, count." He counted, there were 21 potatoes. "Lie down!" He stood on his shoulders and said: "Just count right, because if you make a mistake, it's all over again." And he hit him with an oak stick 21 times on his buttocks and back. My father thinks to himself: "Now it’s my turn”. But no, he told him to keep going. So, not everyone was doing well in the ghetto.

Children would bring all kinds of news from school, and I would listen to it. In 1938, after Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia, my siblings brought this poem from school: "Hácha understood Hitler's message / They went out for a sausage / Hácha, out of this delight / Gave up Czechia without a fight". I do not know whether Hacha was president or prime minister, but it was he who signed the capitulation of the Czech Republic.