Jiří Fochler

“They made available a part of their company employees to the organization Todt. When that wasn’t enough, the labor office provided the rest of the manpower. They enlisted uncomfortable people who didn’t want to cooperate with them and so it happened that there were three of us from Olšany. There was nobody from some villages but for example from Leština, where there was a majority of Communists, there were thirteen people. They put together a hundred people and we got a summons to Germany, to Berlin, in the Todt organization. My dad - when he received that summons that demanded me to go to Berlin - slammed his fist on the table. He said: ‘What’s that? You're an underage! How do they dare to take you away from me? Come with me, we'll go to Šumperk to the labor office’. We came to the office and my dad started yelling at them. Of course, he spoke fluent German. I could also speak German because we had German at school. At that time it was mandatory just like religion. The official responded: ‘Stop yelling at me! The boy was authorized by the German state and you should shut up! And if you continue to yell at me, you’ll go to jail for demeaning German laws. Sitting in jail for a few years will teach you some respect’. Dad saw that it was bad and thus we better left. He told me: ‘Son, I can’t do anything about it, you’ll have to go’.”

“When the front line had arrived, we went to Dubno. I was supposed to meet with some of the ten guys who had escaped from the Todt Organization. I found only one. Some Zita from Jestřebí. When there was no traffic, so we stopped the cars. No one wanted to give us a ride to Rovno. Then we were taken by some NKVD agents who took us to their office and interrogated us. Then there was an air raid. They left us alone and fled into the foxholes outside of the office. For three days they kept us in the office. Then they didn’t pass us to our unit, but to a Soviet crew. Again, it took three days before we explained to them that we wanted to get to the Czech and not to the Soviet army, that we were Czechs. The Polish army tried to recruit us, the Soviets wanted to recruit us for their army, it was a mess. Everybody tried to get a piece of us.”

"In 1947, they came to me and said: ‘Look, you have to join some political party. We can’t employ anybody without any political affiliation’. So I had no choice but to join some party and therefore I joined the Social Democrats. But in 1948, I saw that people were leaving the Social Democrats and joining the Communists in large numbers. That wasn’t suitable for me because I knew the Communists. There were many of them in the Todt organization, they were from Leština. I knew their opinions and so I simply walked away from politics. When I was supposed to go to the Communist Party, I didn’t do so. I served in Holešov in the Criminal Investigation Department and they brought me to Kroměříž. There was a communist who took me over as a young one. In a month, they had to dissolve it and they threw us into uniforms. I had no rank, nothing. And I was to be command by people who went through half a year in the course and who had fully-fledged ranks, while I remained a candidate for three years.”

“I told them that I needed to go to the bathroom. That floor was in such a niche and there was barbed wire. I waited until the guard bypassed the whole object, then I tossed out my winter coat and everything else out of the window and I climbed out. But I got stuck hanging on my shoulders. Finally, I released and fell out. Suddenly, I saw that someone pulled me on a sleigh. It was in the winter. Snow was everywhere. He put me in the sleigh and rode away through Dubno. ‘Where do you want to get off? ' I said: ‘In the nearest village, I’ll walk myself from there'. Because I didn’t know who the guy was. It was already organized by the underground movement there.”