Ladislav Jůna

“I left from here in the morning. As I was passing by the forest, suddenly I saw a tank riding against me. Its lights were on and I thought: ‘Damn.’ I didn’t listen to the radio and I did not have any news. My Tatra truck was quite big, too, and I kept going straight and he – or they, actually, because there were more of them – made way for me. I kept driving forward. I thought: ‘They are here, they are here, I am riding against tanks (…).’ Suddenly I saw some soldiers standing at the crossroad, and there were convoys of tans riding from Louny in the direction of Žatec. I thought, this is not just for nothing, it looks like war. I was even angry, because I realized that they would slow me down. There was some space in between them, and I passed through, and the Russian soldier jumped aside, and I kept driving and I just looked back to see whether the idiot would start shooting at me or what not.”

“My brother was at home for the weekend and they warned him: ‘Don’t go there, don’t go there, look what’s going on there. You won’t be able to stay here, because they would come looking for you here, but we have many friends.’ There was a certain family, the Polák family; they settled here as well, and they lived in Všetaty behind Rakovník. They too were leasing a farm in some former manor house. ‘You will go that family; you have not done anything wrong, you have your ID card, everything is all right.’ He said: ‘I have nothing to be afraid of, why should I then go to them?’ Well, you see what happened. When they could not take revenge on my dad, they took revenge on my brother. They arrested my brother, and the Prague Uprising basically broke out two weeks later. They arrested him on Saturday just as he was having lunch, and the Gestapo men in civilian clothing came for him and they did not even let him take his coat. Nobody has ever seen him again. We still expected that he would return from somewhere, but we feared the worst. On the radio they kept talking about people who were coming home all the time. But when brother was still not coming home, dad’s health began to falter. They had taken them from here to the jail in Žatec; it was a district jail. They spent the night there. They also took the Russians from here, Russian soldiers who were prisoners of war and who were working for farmers at the farms here. They thus gathered these seven prisoners and my brother. They slept in the prison for one night. There was a total of twenty-two of them. They took them in the direction of Chomutov – or at least they told them they were going there. But they didn’t take them to Chomutov, but only to Stroupeč. Stroupeč is not far from Žatec, you could go there if you take the road through these small villages down there. Stroupeč is located in a river valley, and the land there is not fertile at all, it is just shrub. There was an old shaft and that’s where they shot all of them to death. The place was five hundred metres away from the last house in the village. There were twenty-two of them, and they killed them in two groups. Dad learnt all this when it was already too late. They shot the first group, and they had their hands and feet tied by a wire, and therefore they had to push them down from the truck and then make them stand up and they shot them and threw their bodies to the shaft. The shaft had a steep incline, and so the bodies probably fell quite deep and then they threw a grenade in there or something and it got all buried under the debris. When they shot the second group of men, they did not know how to how to bury them, and so they just threw some shrubs over them.”

“I apprenticed in Mr. Linhart’s company in Rakovník. I learnt the trade of wood modelling. We were making models for casting and all this stuff. I was thus going to Rakovník to work and he was going home, and later they did not even let me go there. Many times we had to run away, because ground attack airplanes would fly in and wait for the people to escape from the train, and then smash the train to pieces. One day we just departed Milostín, the railroad runs on an elevated track before it reaches Mutějovice, and we suddenly heard a wheeezzzzz sound above us, and we all rushed out of the train. There was some underpass under the train track. The airplanes waited for the people to run away, and then we just heard the sound of machine-gun fire, and we had to walk home, because no trains were running. Even when we went to work in the morning, there were no trains; trains were running only at nights. And so I stopped going to work completely.”

“There was the Revolutionary Guard. People called them looting guards instead, because they were the kind of bastards who had escaped from here, and then they were informing upon people, and all of them were mostly members of the Vlajka organization, who now wanted to establish order here. I don’t want to be biased to all of them, but there were people like that among them, no doubt. They began with interrogations and they arrested all the high-ranking Germans. There were fifteen of them, and they brought them all to the post office here and interrogated them. They wanted to know who had informed the authorities when the Russians and my brother were then arrested as a result, but none of them confessed to anything, and all claimed that did not know anything about it. They were beaten, that’s for sure. They took them to Rakovník and held them there for two weeks, and then they released them. They let them go home, and after a week at home they arrested them again, and I saw it with my own eyes and it was horrible. They beat them so much that there was blood all over the place, blood was literally trickling from some of them. They made them get on a covered truck and they took them away. They took them away and when they returned, they said about them: ‘They do not suffer from any headache anymore.’ They had taken them to Postoloprty.”

“On the tower over there there was a huge swastika which was lit at nights. The swastika was made of wood and light bulbs were installed on it. People built festival gateways in the town, but of course they could not expect them to arrive from here, from the direction of Svojetín. There was a gateway erected at the end of the village, then another at the crossroad of Malá, and another one behind the last farm, up in the hill if you arrive from Žatec. They set up a watch up on the tower; there is a splendid view from the tower. When they saw them leaving Malá Černoc, they began ringing the bells, and all the people started rushing in that direction. I was curious to see how those soldiers looked like. There is a little chapel at the crossroad over there. I hid inside, because otherwise I would have gotten a beating had I walked there among the people, but I was so curious to see the soldiers. They arrived and people were giving them the welcome ‘Heim ins Reich,’ meaning that they were now at home within the German territory, and things like that. In my mind I thought: ‘But these soldiers look just like me, only their helmets are different.’”