Miroslav Brebera

“I don’t remember yet whether it was at noon or before. All of a sudden, a railroad worker came and told us about a train loaded with coal. He suggested to us to hide in the coal. So we buried ourselves in the coal. The train was dispatched from Ostrava to the west, Třebová and so on. We were up to our chins buried in the coal. The train rolled out of the station and it kept going and going, until it crossed the border to the Reich. We arrived in Müglitz (Mohelnice), there were soldiers all over the train station and they searched the cars of the train. The dogs started barking and digging us out of the coal. They discovered us and arrested us. They were thinking what to do with and finally decided that they’d have to hand us over to the Gestapo. So we slept over in Mohelnice and in the morning, we were taken back to Olomouc to the Gestapo.”

“It was raining cats and dogs. There wasn’t much happening but all of a sudden, military trucks arrived in the square and German soldiers jumped out of them. Our school building was located on the square so we got a good sight of what was going on. Because of the propaganda, they thought that Czechoslovakia was impoverished and miserable and thus they brought everything with them, including a field kitchen. They started handing out eintopf. Otta Hrabinec, our teacher and gym teacher, told us: ‘Don’t you dare to talk to the soldiers or take anything from them. Ignore them as if they weren’t there’.”

“We had badges that had GUARD written on them. It was a huge POW camp where they sorted the prisoners. The Austrians were put aside. Then they dealt with the SS-men. They were put aside and the rest went somewhere else. I have no idea what they then did with them in Čáslav. 10 000 POWs came from Náchod, 10 000 from Hradec. They didn’t get farther. There was a huge detention camp in Čáslav.”

“The Spitz family was on very friendly terms with our family. They were our family friends, so to speak. None of them returned back home after the war. Shortly before they left on a transport, they came to us with three or four packs of a beautiful wool textile. Old Spitz said: ‘They’re going to take away everything we have. I’ll hide it here at your place. One day, it might be useful’. After the war – I think it was around the middle of May, maybe even later – a man came to our house with a message. It said that we should give the packs of textile that Albert Spitz had stored at our place to him. It was still there. We hadn’t touched it throughout the war. So we gave it to him.”