Boleslav Janků

"Well, when it finished I stayed there alone. I was the last one. I am not showing off here. The last one to leave the site. And I had to leave Sula behind. He was wounded, somewhere in this area. And he kept saying, ‘If it just wouldn’t hurt!’ But he was a heavy bloke and I could not drag him away. And besides that, two Germans were still firing at us. We were hidden in a ditch and could not stand up. Just for your interest - how we checked, we put a hat on the barrel of the gun and suddenly a bang. It was shot through. It was a neighbour. I said, ‘Peter, I can’t carry you. I can’t pull you away.’ I said, ‘Look at the hat.’ He saw that, I could not take him with me. They would shoot him. I said, ‘Peter, I have to go. I am sorry but I have to leave you here.’”

“And now they say they don’t want to stay with us. They want to go, to meet the approaching army, they say. I think we made a mistake there and as we were inexperienced, we didn’t know. We wanted to help them, so we gave them a revolver and a map, and we marked on the map where we were. Just with a dot. If they made it to the Russian army, they could get us some arms dropped from a plane, as we didn’t have any. I personally only had a six-shot pistol and just one magazine in it. It was meant for my personal security. In case I ever encountered... but we didn’t have any weapons. And after a fortnight the Russians went away, our guys saw them off right to Litovel, to the border. They told them there, ‘Pass through here and you are on the other side.’ Yes, the border was guarded but it didn’t take a long time and a plane started to fly in circles above our forest. The Germans must have photographed every movement, and after fourteen days they had found us.”

“...and one of the Germans was hiding in the car and kept firing. He fired the whole time. Although, I fired back at the car, I could not see him, so I kept changing direction. There ... there... I kept trying but every time, after a little while, “bang”! To get out was quite impossible. And there was another one firing and I could not figure out where from. He laid covered behind the road, in a ditch. It was maybe 100 metres away but I did not know where exactly. Until, all of a sudden, I realised. So I set the sight. I fired at him too but nothing happened. I set the sight the wrong way perhaps. So I set it for him for 100 metres. I aimed, bang, the bloke was gone. I say: ‘So, I got one. But how about the other one? He doesn’t move at all!’”

“Well this way we actually got to the Crhov partisans and after that, we went to different places everyday. The Germans were always one step behind us. They could see where we stopped during the day. They would say, ‘We will catch you at night’. When they arrived, we had already left, we were in a different place by then. Everyday we moved somewhere else and slept in fields, in bushes, without blankets, without cover. Nothing. Because everything was left behind in those bunkers.”

“But when we attacked and were already close to them, our boys started to yell at them. A driver was walking about outside. The car was probably damaged. So, it just stood there and the driver was repairing it. The driver suddenly saw us and started to fire at us, but we were finishing the run. The boys yelled at them, ‘Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!’ So that they don’t fire but it didn’t help. We only had a Bereta, the submachine gun. A Russian had it, he was very sharp and brave. He sprinkled them and the car with bullets and when we made it to the road we were only six metres apart from them and that’s how we fired at each other. And the Russian was hit and knocked into the submachine gun. It stopped working and he was shot at. Somewhere in the right side, here. There was a small hole in the front, but one could put a fist into his back. Torn-out flesh. They had fired, what used to be called, dum-dum bullets. It was a nasty wound. So the boys, who were able to pulled him away. I said, this was the worst moment of my life. The ten Russians with the guns were not to be seen. They ran away and left us there.”