"From December 27 to February 15, 1986, he was lying under a spruce tree covered with snow. A big thaw came, and a civilian discovered him. He reported it anonymously. There was a roundabout, it was an extraordinary event. The army came, the police came, they investigated. And the conclusion was that the department had lost its exemplary service flag, and the career soldiers had lost their bonuses. That's what drove them most crazy. And while the subject is bullying, they said publicly at roll call that Bultas, the one who came back, was responsible. That he didn't report anything and didn't provide help. They were going to give him a military prosecutor, but the autopsy found that Bultas came to the unit only after the death of that Müller. Müller froze to death before Bultas reached the unit, according to the warden's book. So he couldn't have helped him. So they couldn't give him a prosecutor. And at that moment, the conscripts said that Bultas was morally responsible. This way, they instructed the second-year soldiers and the old hands beat him up. His lower jaw was broken, and he ended up in a military hospital. Then, they didn't bring him back and transferred him elsewhere. Speaking of bullying, the enlisted soldiers gave the boys the green light to give him a thorough beating."
"Olda had a sprain, he slipped on the wet floor, it hurt him terribly. Bultas, the first-year boy, the glazier, also had an injury. Some kind of accident. Since our doctor just graduated, he sent them both to Žďár for a specialist examination. That was between Christmas and New Year's Eve, around December 27. They met there in Žďár, it was six kilometres away from us, they had to go there by train. They went from doctor to doctor, then to a pub, and they got terribly drunk. They took the train back, but as they were so drunk, they missed the station and got off only in Přibyslav which was about ten kilometres away from us. The investigation showed that they didn't want to wait for the train, from how drunk they were, they didn't want to wait for the train back. They said they would walk along the old railway line. They knew that the barracks were on it and that they couldn't miss them, but it started to snow heavily during the day, they walked seven or eight kilometres along the line, it wore them out terribly. Olda Müller lay down under a tree, about a kilometre away from our barracks, this was found out by the investigation, he lay down under a spruce tree, and fell asleep. And this Bultas made it, but not until about five o'clock in the morning, back to the barracks but alone. In the morning, it was already known that Olda Müller had not returned. Bultas was still hungover, so it was discussed. Now, there was an investigation into Müller's whereabouts. A figure came in, a lieutenant or first lieutenant Marcinko, a representative of military counterintelligence in our unit. He was a guy in civilian clothes driving a green Škoda 120. Nobody introduced him to us officially. We knew who he was, but not officially. Marcinko investigated Olda's disappearance. They visited his parents and friends, they found out everything. It was assumed that he had escaped to Austria."
"There was a thing that happened, after about a fortnight there, in high temperatures when it was around 30 degrees Celsius. Our group, our unit, young guys were fainting, we were 24 years old. We were standing on the parade ground, even the parade ground was different - on the left side, it was smaller. I experienced the guy in front of me falling on his face like a traffic light, he fell. As students, we had... we were allowed to have sunglasses. He had sunglasses on, he fell on his face like a traffic light, he knocked the guys in front of him, he was the first one to have a high fever, he had a 40-degree Celsius fever, during the Saturday afternoon, 50 people out of 180 people fell, suddenly they started having high fevers. I'm talking about that because it was said about 150 people out of 180 ended up in the infirmary. I'm proud to say, that I was among the last ones. Supposedly, it was caused by a basic service soldier infected with highly contagious angina lacunaris supposedly spitting in the food. Hence, it spread among us. The soldiers' hatred of the graduates was such that they wanted to take something out on us, that we as graduates were not going to have it easy in the military. They allocated us a separate tesko barrack on the other side of the barracks, next to the canteen, they allocated capacity there, and they took all the sick with tonsillitis there. Doctors came from Pilsen and Klatovy to find out what was going on, finally, they separated the strain of angina and found out what it was. They injected us with antibiotics, pendepon."
"Eventually, concerning the operated leg, I was not the most exemplary soldier, and they had me called up five months after the military service for training. It wasn't the most common thing. I got confirmation that I had had my knee operated on. I had a medical certificate, I went for a review, but no longer to the military administration in Prague 6, but to Prague West, where I belonged. When we got bored at the military service, we looked into our military books and found out the diagnoses written there. I had a diagnosis of 617, chronic inflammation of the uterus. No one ever gave it a second thought, but when I went to the review with the doctor's note, there was an Army doctor sitting there, a major. He had the recorders there, and he says, 'What's wrong with you, man?' 'Comrade Major, the uterus is fine, but my knee is still bothering me.' 'What kind of bullshit are you talking about. What uterus?' 'Well, read it in the military book.' He compared the diagnoses and said, 'That's complete bullshit.' He started yelling at the recorders, who were innocent and had nothing to do with it. Then, he took a pencil and crossed out the diagnosis. He wrote in 717. They had written down a wrong number, and he fixed it to be the knee."
"It went so far that they would come back from their leaves drunk and take it out on the first-years. They had to scrub the hallway with a toothbrush, we had a hallway, and it was glass. The quarters were modern, there were glass displays with a niche. A first-year boy rebelled, and the old hand threw him through the display case, the filling broke. That was trouble, they would find out something had happened so it couldn't stay that way. We walked around the unit looking for windows to cut out. There was a soldier there, Bultas, a first-year glazier. And he glazed it and kept it from coming out. The boy had cuts - the first-year boy. They said he scratched himself while climbing over the fence. These kinds of excuses, we lied all the way."
"And in the end, it was found to be angina lacunaris, classic angina, and after a week, half of us fell ill. I got it after ten days. The head of the department, Colonel Bergl, gave a speech to us. He stood in front of us and said, 'Comrades, my wife was not at the final training camp with the troops, and she also got ill, she is also vomiting, she is also sick.' And from the windows of the surrounding quarters came the words, 'Yeah, but from you!' That is, the enlisted men who had been there all along commented on it."
Martin Cvrček was born on 13 December 1960 in Prague. His parents, who came from wealthy families, suffered the communist coup in 1948. His mother, Jarmila, was arrested by the communists along with her parents in the early 1950s for alleged economic irregularities. They were released thanks to the presidential amnesty in 1953. Karel Cvrček waited for her while she was in prison, and they married when she returned. They had three sons together, and the family lived in Jíloviště near Prague. Both parents lost all their property. They lived in a rental in their former house. Martin Cvrček witnessed the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968. The Soviet army settled on the nearby Cukrák television transmitter. Martin Cvrček‘s father painted an inscription ‚Walter Ulbricht equals Hitler‘ on the wall of the Hubertus Hotel. But he remained unidentified. Martin Cvrček entered the grammar school in Dobříš in 1976, and four years later he was admitted to the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. During his studies, he attended the military department, and at the final training camp at the combat unit in Janovice nad Úhlavou he experienced an epidemic of tonsillitis, which affected most of the 180 university students. After graduation, he was deferred from the army because of a meniscus injury. He enlisted in October 1986, after a month-long reception in Prague he served at the military centre in Sázava. As a college graduate, he was in the military for one year. As a platoon leader, he tried to suppress bullying among the soldiers of the basic service. It occurred mainly when the soldiers of the second year - the old hands - returned drunk from a walk. They made the first-year soldiers‘ - the rookies‘ - military service hell. At Martin Cvrček‘s unit, an old hand froze to death at the end of the year. He went to the barracks with a rookie, which the officers blamed for his death. They left it to the old hands, who beat the rookie and broke his jaw. Martin Cvrček retired in the fall of 1987. He went into engineering. In 2022, he lived in Jíloviště near Prague.
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!
