“When I came to Leipzig, it was only partially damaged - a few small factories on the peripheries. But then the air raids started being announced day and night - when the American squadrons came at us, they laid it down thick on us. When their bombs didn’t hit the ATG Leipzig factory, but instead landed on the camp, the buildings which held us who were on forced labour, then those buildings also held forty Russian women, and they weren’t allowed to flee the factory even during an alarm. The rest of us could run out, but not them, and so they got a direct hit. And so none of those forty Russian women came out again - not one of them. And the biggest air raid on Leipzig I experienced was the run on the train station. That time, before the squadrons arrived and started bombing, we were under the station in concrete bunkers. From there they herded us out, whether we were German or not, all of us out and into the park with its so-called Splittergrabens - these kind of trenches covered up by beams and earth. So they herded us off there. And that might well have been our good fortune, because most of the Germans who were heading off on holiday, who they sent into the bunkers [under the station], almost all of them never came back up again. That was my biggest air raid.”
“You know, I knew it would be propagandistic nonsense, even my father kept on telling me not to believe any of the German proclamations. They always spoke of tons and tons of sunken ships and I don’t know what else - for instance the radio would announce: Über unserem Gebiet befindet sich kein Kampfverband - There is currently no squadron flying over our territory. But he hadn’t even finished speaking when the bombs started falling. A striking example of how fanaticised they were. Even the announcer reported falsehoods, because they must have known by then that the planes had crossed the borders, that they were flying over the city - and yet he announces that there is no squadron flying over their territory.”
Václav Bodlák was born on the 28th of March 1924 in Cukmantl - now called Pozorka, a part of the town of Dubí in Teplice District. His parents had a hen coop in the village of Suchá. In 1933, Václav Bodlák experienced the rise of German fanaticism, which culminated after the annexation of the Czech border regions in 1938. At the time, his parents sent Václav and his sister to stay with relatives in Prague. His father worked as a tailor in a trolley company. Because he refused to join the Sudeten German Party, he was fired from his job, and thus decided to move to Prague. Václav Bodák learned to be a waiter, graduating in 1939 and subsequently registering at the Employment Office. There he was assigned the job of mechanic in an aircraft factory in Prague, where he worked on the production of wings for the cargo planes Junkers 52. He was then transferred to Leipzig to the ATG Leipzig factory, which also produced aircraft. He experienced heavy bombing, surviving only by a miracle. He and four other colleagues escaped from their forced labour and returned to Prague. After the war he volunteered into the army. He was stationed at the Pravčická brána natural monument. He then returned to Teplice, he worked in his uncle‘s pub in Cukmantl, later on Komáří hůrka Mountain. In Cukmantl he met his future wife. Václav Bodlák‘s wife was from a mixed family - her father was Czech (a shoemaker), her mother German. The marriage gave two children.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
