František Bocek

“One guy was on guard and a grenade exploded in between us. The shrapnel cut open his side and ripped out his guts. He was holding them in his hands. He would keep saying: ‘Gott muss helfen’. God help me. Gott ist nicht. There’s no God. I saw too many dead in the war.”

“We were all on duty and would see each other only on holidays like Christmas. We met at my uncle’s place in Český Těšín. It was a very impoverished place. We didn’t have proper shoes and had to wear ‘krpce’ instead. You’d kill a pig, skin it and make sort of boots from the worked skin. It was made of the skin of the pig. These were no shoes. We’d call it krpce.”

“It was nearby Katowice. Our cannons were stationed there and each one was guarded by a patrol. A Polish partisan killed one of the guards. The Germans caught him and they shot him. He was from the city of Sosnowiec. They were shelling the city for the whole night. I asked the commander why we were bombarding the city. He said that it was because they killed our guard. They caught him. So 24 cannons were shelling the city and it was on fire within half an hour. Twenty four cannons and every single one had its own name. Our cannon had the name Conrad.”

“Three days prior to the arrival of the Russians, they were ordered to the trenches. They took my brother and put him on a train to Yakutsk, Siberia. There, he had to dig for gold. They were regularly up to 80 meters below ground. Those who died were thrown outside and the bears would feast on the corpses. That’s what the Russians did.”

“The fighter planes were flying circles above our heads and sprayed us with cannon fire. It was four of us plus our commander. All of us had to learn how to fire a machine gun. I was the last one. I grabbed that thing in my arm and the fighter came. We just couldn’t believe our eyes. The bullets were bouncing off that plane. It was just like throwing green peas against a wall. So he arrived and opened fire at me. There was a high chimney. There’s no such high chimney like that one in Jeseník. If it wasn’t for that chimney I wouldn’t be sitting here today. My legs were shaking for half an hour afterwards. I was completely terrified.”

“The commanders then went home and left us to ourselves. There was a box and we took the Russian grenades out of it. It was the kind of egg-grenades – we hadn’t used any of them. And already in the morning, we saw little American tanks on the fields in the distance. There was a footbridge and a ditch and we hid the grenades there. We came to one of the houses of the peasants. He didn’t want to have anything to do with us. He said: ‘get away from here’. The Americans came on a jeep. You should have seen them – they ripped away our epaulettes and our backpacks. We had backpacks as good as new. There were two shirts in there, a bottle, spoons and some food inside. We had all of this inside our backpacks. They poured a gas can on it and set it on fire. Four backpacks including the blankets. And then we had to run 7 kilometers to the nearest internment camp. There was an incredible amount of soldiers. At first we were just a few. But later, there must have been at least five thousand of us. We had to move three times. It was on a large field. There were Germans, Hungarians and Romanians. It was all under the open sky. We were lice-infested within three days.”