Ing., Colonel Oldřich Hukal

"…one more experience when we didn’t feel very well. It was a border patrol. They loaded our unit into a Tatra 805 and took us to the Hungarian border. It was like in a bad film, at left there were the ruins of a castle with a crescent above. We were informed that a platoon of some 20 border guards was near us, that they would be brought some food containers around midnight, and that a Hungarian would pass by at about one o’clock on his way to a factory in Filakovo. We heard occasional firing from Salgótarján. We stood by a rivulet, spread into line and started digging trenches, and when we had dug about 10 cm deep it started to rain. So we stood over the puddles, put our tarpaulins on and waited. We were 19 years old, it wasn’t very nice and we thought: What should we do? Our units are 12 km away from us, there are six of us and we know there is a rebelling political and tank military school in Hungary; they sided with the counter-revolution. Reportedly, they were to try to shoot their way through along the border to Vienna, that’s what we were told. So we didn’t feel well, realising the force that we would be faced with. Eventually, at one o’clock an owl hooted, maybe it was a signal, who knows - with the crescent moon in the sky ... and we heard some sounds. Then we saw a shadowy figure on the Hungarian side where there was a path. A man came to us, we knew his name, he said the name, it was Kelemen, so we let him through and nothing happened. At 6 o’clock in the morning the 805 arrived and by then, Russians had already deployed tanks along our and Romanian borders, made a pincer movement in front of Vienna and the rebels never fought their way in."

"…one day we were walking home from school, it was at the end of the war. By the railway, just where the road from Slatina crosses the Louny-Lovosice railway, there were many tanks, then trucks and then old, bearded Siberian guys riding horses. On their way from Dresden, they had passed by the Diana chocolate factory in Děčín and then by the Deli in Lovosice and they had plundered them. They had truckloads and tank turrets full of chocolates and they knew that they couldn’t bring it all home. There were three of us and we soon learned how to shout "Long live Red Army!" in Russian, and they threw us bags of candy and boxes of chocolate. We picked it up and slipped it under our shirts. That went on for about 3 days, the convoys were just endless, it must have been an entire army or two. On the third day when I came home, my mother told me: “Be ashamed, are you greedy?” When I got my hands on a German daily ration, there were ten cigarettes, coffee candy for guards to stay awake at night, grape sugar and other things. When I unpacked it, my dad got the cigarettes, my mum took the coffee candy which she proceeded to melt to make coffee, and I got the other sweets."