One mine after another, we didn’t know where to run
Václav Jeřábek was born on March 22, 1923, in Pacov near Tábor, but soon he moved with his mother and sisters to Kežmarok in Slovakia, where his mother came from. Everyone from the family then received Slovak citizenship. At the age of eighteen years, Václav enrolled in the Slovak Army and was assigned to the artillery. In 1944, together with seven of his friends, he participated in the Slovak National Uprising. While retreating from the Germans, they would at first hide in one of the villages and then in the woods, where they wanted to join the guerrillas but their plan didn’t work out. From October to November 1944, he was hiding in Dolní Lehota and with the help of his sisters who got false travel documents for him he was able to get back home to Kežmarok. There he went into hiding until January 1945, when he became active as a soldier and was sent to fight in Liptovský Mikuláš. He witnessed the end of the war in hospital due to his poor health condition. After the war, he moved to Prague. In the 1950s, one year after the completion of his education he began to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a clerk and was posted first to the embassy in Vienna and later to the embassy in The Hague. Early on in the 1960s, he was dismissed from the ministry and worked in a company dealing with the export of footwear.
