Emil Appl

“What he could not forget was that when he came to us from a POW camp, I was the first person to speak to him. I returned from work and saw him sitting there, so I said: ´Što ty takovej.´(What happened to you?) He said he was a plemnyj (prisoner) and that he was to work as a driver for us. So I said: ´Come and join us.´ We, the Czechs, had such a small room there, so I invited him right away. And since that time he was always telling me: ´After such a long time you were the first person who talked to me as to a human being.´”

“When we were retreating, I was riding a tractor, and there was one Russian riding with us. The Russian tanks were already on one side, and on the other there was a village. We got stuck there. It was freezing, twenty five below zero, the situation was desperate, it was at night. I said: ´Come on, let’s run away, we will go to that village, we cannot go on anymore, it’s over for us. They will be here in no time.´ And he says: ´No, no, we gotta run away, you don’t know what our people are capable of.´ And that guy was a political educator! He was a Russian captive, they were working for us as drivers.”

“There were many young girls working with us, and we talked to them. One day, when we were north of Lviv, there was one road mender, he was a German from the Reich. And one day, while he was working in the forest with these young girls, he dared to make some advances to one of them. When he came there the day after, a partisan stepped out of the forest and fired a burst from a submachine gun at him. My boss sent me there the following day. What was I to do? We buried him in the morning and the boss told me to go there instead of that guy. So I took some ten girls, we got onto a truck and rode there. Then I asked one girl to watch one side of the road bend, and another girl was to watch the other side in case there was someone coming. I sat down on the roadside with the others and talked to them, because I knew they were watching me. Some three or four days after, while I was sitting there like that and chatting with them, a really beautiful girl came to me and said: ´Look, you speak our language, you know German, we would need you.´ I told her: ´You know what, I want to get home.´”

“Then we went to Nový Jičín, where we were building garages and barracks, and to Staré Rudné pod Praděděm, to build stables for horses, so that during a parade, our generals could ride horses in front of the tanks like in Russia. And then I got to Opava, to Skřečoň, where I was released from the army. (...) My father was a small entrepreneur, he earned some money, he lost some money. And in two years I learnt what my personal evaluation was. It read: ´He likened our state system to the Protectorate.´ What really happened was that when I was summoned by the commission in Pardubice, they asked me: ´So you are employed by your father?´ - ´Yes, I still am. We are clearing away the store and from the New Year on I will be employed by the collective.´ They replied: ´We need people!´ - ´But I have returned from my basic military service a year ago. I have served for two years!´ - ´Well, but we need people for manual work!´ - ´Well, for me it would then be the same like it happened during the Reich. I also got summoned and within two days I was on my way to Berlin.´ He wrote it into my personal evaluation file. ´Likened the present-day state system to the Protectorate. He also pretends to hold various sham jobs, he despises work and he is of a bourgeois origin.´ Such was the evaluation they wrote into my file.”