Jiří Frank

"They beat them up. That's why I said that, they beat them up harshly, and like I said, they got one blanket and they had that for sun and rain and sleep. So the food was poor, they were really dying by the dozens there in the camp. There was no food, there was nothing. And as soon as someone said something, complained, they got hit with a stick. So as they say, the Americans took them at their mercy, here at least in this camp they didn't."

"My mom was just doing laundry and once there was an American soldier at the gate with a bunch of laundry with him. They talked it out with their hands, my mother washed it for him, ironed it, and he came and brought a big tin, probably a four-pound can of meat, it was squares cut up like that, chewing gum and all kinds of things. And when one of them saw the other ones that my mom was washing, he brought more detergent, because my mom didn't have that, poor woman. So they brought the detergent and Mom was doing their laundry. I had a good time too. They gave me a couple of rides in a jeep around the market and they gave me chocolates, chewing gum, just like that."

“[In the origins of the] TOM group I felt all kinds of pressure on me. We founded the group in 1971 and continued with it. In 1972 there were inspections of all technical-economic workers. I didn’t pass it and our director literally told me: ‘Give notice because if the company fires you then no one will ever hire you again.’ So I quit and still – everywhere I applied I got rejected. ‘After reading your political evaluation we cannot accept you for the required position.’”

“I once had a conversation when I was still in the Dřevopodnik company. That they would like to talk to me. – About what? – ‘Well, you’ll learn that when we get there.’ Because I had known it was the State Security and that they sometimes took someone in and never let him go, I told it to my wife. She was pregnant at that time with our daughter Marie. The meeting was by the lime tree near Holajka. A Tatra 603 came and the two of them came out. We said hi to each other. - ‘Come, sit, let’s go.’ We arrived at the Moscow hotel in Zlín, they had their little room there. We were there for two hours. I had one beer on their bill. One of them had a tape recorder and held a microphone down under the table. - ‘You can put the microphone on the table because I have nothing to hide.’ The started, saying I worked in an anti-state Scout group and that I had been seen by the campfire. In short, they just kept repeating that to get something out of me. - ‘Please, if you saw me by the campfire then it must be a photomontage.’ I didn’t know then that it could be a picture from our summer camp. But they corrected it by saying it had been taken on Ing. Vémola’s cottage where I had been part of a group. - ‘But please, where is this supposed cottage of Ing. Vémola? I don’t know.’ And that was the end of my interrogation.”

“He went through the entire Eastern Front. He had a map at home, it got lost, where he showed me their advancement. All the battles you read about in the newspaper: Orel, Jazma, he was practically all the way in Moscow. There they had to start gradually retreating back. He didn’t return via Stalingrad but via Kiev and Romania, Yugoslavia, Austria. There they got caught by the U.S. Army. He got to a POW camp in Strasbourg. It was tough, soldiers really died out in great numbers there. They got one blanket against sun, rain and for sleeping. My father was really lucky that he lay near the kettle in which lunch was prepared. As they peeled potatoes, he stuck the skins on the kettle and made something like chips out of it. That’s how he got some extra food. Then he was lucky again when a French businessman came and needed a cabinetmaker. My father was trained in cabinetmaking. So he was picked and taken to the French businessman’s home. There he worked until his repatriation.”