Bohumír Dufek

“You will go to Moravská Třebová, I got stamped blank ID cards there for our resistance activities.’ I thus went there. I received the package, which was carefully wrapped, and this was to become a great advantage for me later. When they later arrested the guy, I claimed: ‘I don’t know anything, Karel Kašpárek only told me that I was to pick up something which he had kept in his classmate’s place.’ (…) When the StB police was interrogating me, they asked me: ‘What were you doing in Moravská Třebová?’ I claimed that I had never been there in my life. ‘Really? (…) And what about you stopping by in the national administration office there?’ Then I knew that things went wrong and that they had probably arrested him and he had told them everything.”

“We took the oath on October 28th; I was still in the regular armed units at that time. I had been a regular soldier until they found out about it. (…) I am actually a PTP soldier who has done armed training. The ceremony on October 28th was already conducted in the style of the minister of defence Čepička, it was in a festive atmosphere, and all the officials were standing on a huge platform. A political officer climbed up to the speaker’s desk (…) and he was yelling at us about various subversive elements that have sneaked their way into the army and were trying to disrupt it from within, but although they are hiding behind their academic degrees, we shall unmask them, and we shall destroy them. I was standing three metres away from him. I received lunch, but immediately afterward my name was called out… and I was ordered to hand over my rifle, and from then on we were going to work to the train station where we were unloading apples from the Balkans from one train onto another. In this way we loafed away the entire November, and on November 30th I was already doing a miner’s work in the coal mines. I have to say that the work in the mines was a terrible training.”