Ladislav Janouch

“When we neared our borders, my experience as a soldier told me something was up. I saw military campsites there, that they had full gear with them, that they were in full numbers. I gaped... I didn’t know what was going on... And when, after I returned, I asked our functionaries and our counter-intel if there was to be some exercises or what... no one had a clue, no one knew anything... it was really secret. At that instance I realised: ‘You smart aleck, you saw it there, you saw the forces gathering. In that narrow area.’ The history of it was that an emergency was declared, I don’t know if it was before or after midnight. Report to your sections. The army commander also knew only what they told him by phone. That allied forces had crossed the borders and that he had been ordered not to shoot. Because, just think of it, our humble army against those hundreds of thousands... it would be a bloodbath... no shooting...”

“From Benešov, from the exerzierplatz, occupied German territory, there was a division moving up, Totenkopf I think it was called. And there was a little strip of grass in front of the villa, with people running to and fro, and the Germans started shooting at them. And one young boy – he lived in the house there, or next door – the Germans shot him there. He lay there and no one could go to him. The Germans assaulted us and started yelling: ‘Keine Partisanen?!’ And I, being quite used to German, I started shouting: ‘Nein, keine, keine, keine.’ But we rushed back home before the Germans came because we were armed, we both had pistols; we looked for a place to hide them because we were convinced that the Germans would search the houses. We shifted the cooker away from the wall in the kitchen, pulled out the chimney pipe that led from it, and stuck the pistols and bullets in there. And then the Germans took me hostage. I got myself out of it, but in such an odd kind of way. There was shooting there all the time, bullets whizzing around, and no one knew where they were coming from. And there was a German soldier with me there in the yard, who was guarding me, and suddenly someone shot that soldiers in the buttocks, from the back, in the hip. He turned and fell to the ground. The Germans started an alarm, rushed outside, took him, and pulled him in. I stayed there, the situation calmed down, all was quiet. Now what? Are they to shoot me? So I mustered my courage and dashed off, climbed over one fence that was there, and started to run.”

“We found ourselves amidst a running crowd, and then we could dodge through to the foot of the Hrdlořezy hill, which was scarred with trenches as protection for the surrounding factories. And the only thing we could do was to jump into the trenches, deep or not, and hope that if we stick our head as low down as possible, it might perhaps miss us. When we came running out into the main street, we heard the whirr, booming like; when a bomber group approaches, it gives out this dark, booming noise. It was almost a hundred bombers. We looked round and saw them coming, they were somewhere above the western part of Prague. And you could see the bombs dropping down like a curtain. So I reckoned they’d be upon us in a moment.”