Václav Dušek

“In 1948 I decided that we should restore FAWOZ and go abroad, but the boys already had their jobs and they didn’t want to go. Only one of them, Zdeněk Odehnal, had been in West Germany in 1948 in a camp, and he came back because there was nothing to do there. He went there after 1948. I told him: ´Zdeněk, I won’t go, I have to finish the law school.´ In 1949 I told him: ´Zdeněk, I have graduated, could we go together? Will you guide me over the border?´ - ´OK.´ - ´Which way should we go?´ - ´Via Domažlice.´ We agreed that we would go by an express train from the main station at two o’clock. I took my younger brother with me, he also wanted to go. We met at the station and boarded the train, and Zdeněk said: ´I’ll just go and buy myself a beer.´ He went for the beer and didn’t return to the train and so we went without him.”

“We played soccer on Sunday, and I told him: ´Boss, today is my last day, because I got Technische Nothilfe.´ The club chairman was a hotel owner, he had the Hotel At Three Lime Trees in Jaroměř. He told me: ´No way, I’d rather go instead of you and you’d serve beer in my hotel.´ He said: ´Come in the evening and we’ll see what to do next.´ In the evening the officers came to his hotel for dinner and he told me: ´Go to the barracks in Josefov tomorrow!´ There were depots there, it was called Zentralersatzteillager, a central depot of spare parts, I went there, spoke to the man, told him that the hotel owner Kudrna sent me, and that I had received a notice for Technische Nothilfe. I showed the paper to him, he looked at it, saw the telephone number of the labour office written there, and he called them and explained in German that I got a notice for Technische Nothilfe, but that I couldn’t go there, because I was working for him.”

“Velichovky Spa is near Jaroměř, and marshal Schörner had his general staff there. Communication cables were placed in the fields, leading to the general staff who gave the orders. We, the group, were given a task to go there, cut up some 20 metres of that cable, leave and then discard it somewhere. So we cut a 20 metre piece, and we threw it into the pond in Černožice, which was about a kilometer away, and we went the other way through Rasošky to Josefov.”

“The resistance took the barracks in Josefov. There was a guard, and I was one of the members, we took turns. We didn’t live in the barracks, we would always go home to sleep. We were taking turns every twelve hours and going there. The refugees from the east had wagons with their stuff in the courtyard. I was on guard in the barracks, in the evening I found out that there were many people, and I told them: ´Friends, pack your stuff and leave, you have no right to be here...´ They came there to steal. I walked all the way up to the ramparts and there was shooting going on, it was dark and I fell down from the ramparts. It was about eight meters high and I broke my leg.”