Bořivoj Janhuba

“It was the Red Army that liberated us, when it was all so hot in 1946. So we all were basically Communists. However, we were arguing with each other already during the elections and after 1946. We didn't vote the Communists anymore in 1946. Such guys as my brother and I and so on. I was excluded from the party after the check in 1948. My brother parted with the party after, an incident with one of his leaders and his son was the one who paid for it. He should have gone to study but the Communists stopped him from going there.”

“So we were off. We put it there and ran away from there. What happened next? Well, the carriages were set on fire then. They got a message that, there was a carriage on fire on the railway route. We also started throwing such little boxes. They were filled with some acid. When you threw it into the coal, it corroded and and then it started burning in the carriage. You know, things like that.”

“We simply got a message that this and that was going to happen here and there. For example, they'll go in the direction Chromeč–Bludov. There were German military leaders. So we cut the posts and disrupted the lines. Shoo off before someone comes. And then they were in a trouble. By the time they found it and set it right, we were laughing. In any case, it was no combat because partly there was simply nowhere to hide, there were no woods for our activities, and partly, we weren't armed properly. We had weapons, pistols, and hunting guns – shot guns. I think there was just one shot gun in our group. Bittner had it. That was all. So what could we do then? We could do only subversive activities.”

“It was at Schefter's, that our resistance started springing up. It was from 1940 until 1942. The resistance was fully gearing up already. First there were smaller groups, then People's Committees, and then there were organized treasonous actions against the Germans. For example, grenades were being made. Bombs for carriages were being made, then they were thrown into carriages and they were set on fire then. Sand was put in the carriages in order to seize the wheels. We simply started general resistance activities.”

“So we sat, Radko with his machine gun at the edge of the wood here on top and we were ten. We had a machine gun and some weapons then. It was the end of the war. The old guys were there with us, the Daněk brothers and Šváb. And when the platoon came, well, not a whole platoon, they could be around twenty. They came to us and we shouted at them, 'Halt! Hände hoch!' ('Stop! Hands up!') Because they were not about to do it, we attacked them. From there and just there. Radko Pečánek started shooting at them with his machine gun from the top. All hands, 'hände hoch,' were up that instant but there were four or six of them shot already. So we took their weapons from them and we let them go.”