Ján Hanes

“They kept saying, we´d go home. They used to talk about it for four – five days. Finally we got to that point and we had to put everything into original conditions. As soon as we pulled out the V3S trucks, we had to fill the holes as well as dried earthclosets up. We tried to even it out so that nothing was seen there. That´s when I knew we were going away. We were cleaning it for two days, filling in the holes and waiting until evening, when we left. On our way we arrived to some other exercising ground, where we slept over, and continued to go home during the next day. We arrived to the garrison, to carpark in Terezín, during the daylight. The cars were pulled under the car ports, everything was put away and we walked to our barracks.”

“And there we simply dug everything. Earthclosets, holes, we masked it, so that no one could see us, we waited and guarded. Ourselves. And I know that some Pole used to walk around, so I assumed we had to be close to the Polish borders, or even in Poland already, because whatever we cooked, he would take from the leftovers, from sewage. There really had to be poverty, because from what we threw away, he tried to choose meat and took it away. I only knew, people used to talk about uneasy life because of some Solidarity party being there. But we only heard that. Why? Until now I don´t even know, why we actually were there.”