Bořivoj Janhuba

“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.”

“The French prisoner escaped from the camp in Chromeč and he dwelt in the woods at Bohdíkov and the Bohdíkov men knew about him. So due to the girls, they were their parents, we got to know that there was a prisoner and that it was needed to do something about it. We discussed it in our organization in Zábřeh. They got the documents ready because the documents were made by Holouš. He was a printer. And we brought the French prisoner to Zábřeh. We handed him over to Holouš and he sent him from Zábřeh – we didn't witness that in Zábřeh – to Yugoslavia. Well, and they were caught on the border checkpoint in Maribor. It is on the border, Maribor, they were caught there and we got to know it from there. More of our men were going there. More of them were sent there.”

“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.”