Alois Grůz

“He came home weighing thirty-five kilos. I was afraid of him, and I didn’t come home for several days. I stayed at my grandma’s. I was afraid of him because I was stressed out. You could see his bones coming out. He also had stomach ulcers, which didn’t help either. When he was interned in Poland, he worked at a tannery, so he told me how they washed the leather in chlorinated lime to get the hairs to come off. They washed it in the solution to have just the clean leather. Dad said all his fingernails came off from it. They didn’t have any gloves. He was there for about half a year.”

“There’s a farm in Bludov near to the church, and they weapons there. When you come at the chapel in Bludov from the direction of the spa, there’s a little villa there, and they had a weapons stored there as well, which is where we took them from. The boys we were, eager for anything. The German army was already retreating, and there was a blown bridge near Loučení, at the crossroads to Zábřeh, Klášterec, and Šumperk. We went there. I remember that the Germans could have shot us - we had weapons and we were civilians. The Germans went past us in droves, and none took any notice of us. I had about three SMGs around my neck. We trekked from Bludov to Zborov. I guess they divided it up between them then, but I don’t know about that.”