Břetislav Kašpar

"My parents couldn't find any work after the first World War, so some men came to Czechoslovakia recruiting for work and my parents moved to France, together with others, to get a job. So we got there in 1923 I guess, so I was a year and a half old. They asked around for a place in a glassworks, as my parents were from a glassworking family, and I also learnt the craft while in France. And that's what I did until the end, until my retirement."

"A group of Germans remained in Dunkirk, and there were the Allied forces there. I came round through Belgium to La Panne, which was on the Belgian side. We had Canadians on one flank and Englishmen on the other. And the Germans had what were called by the English as 'booby traps,' doors rigged with explosives and stuff like that. We lived in bunkers that the Germans had built there, and we kept watch. And we didn't do anything else there, just from time to time someone gave an order and everyone started blasting the blue out of the sky, from all sides, machine gunners wherever they were. And suddenly an announcement came. Well, it wasn't all that sudden, that's just what it seemed like, but anyway after some time the cease-fire came about. The war was over. We stayed there another two or three days - where we had our firing post, which was among the dunes, just dunes. And we found out that the Germans were less than a hundred metres away from our position! But they were hidden so well, that you couldn't see them anywhere at all during the day. So we were watching them, as you can imagine, because it was the end of the war! They were jumping up and down as well, waving their hands. And we were waving back at them, but they stayed behind while we were ordered away. Because Prague was already calling for help at the time."

"And there was this lieutenant there at the time, I can't remember what his name was, it's more than eighty years ago (sixty in fact - transl.), Bartoš or Bartoň or something like that, and he contacted our group. He asked us to gather up in Bordeaux, that there was some international organization there, that we could try to get the Czechs that were placed - under the false assumption that they were Germans - in prison camps in France, that we could try to get them out of there. I could show you that we were just two men charged with this, me and one Karel Kyršdorf. Well, we didn't quite manage it in a week, but the French were fairly forthcoming, so we got about eighty of them out, eighty Czechs."

"The first Czech town they told us we could be greeted in, where there were Czechs, was Stříbro, I remember that. There were pretty girls there. So we thought, look, Czech girls at last, so we started making their acquaintance: 'Give me a kiss?' - 'Ich verstehe nicht, ich verstehe nicht.' The girls were all German!"

"When they imprisoned my brother, I kept telling him one thing when I visited him time to time. He was in Jáchymov and I visited him on several occasions. I wanted him to be judged as a Frenchman, because he was sent to forced labour as a Frenchman. And I insisted to his wife, that if he would be judged as a Frenchman, they could convict him of espionage at most. But he was obstinate, he was a Czech! And as a Czech, he wouldn't let... Treason and high treason - so they sentenced him to fifteen years. I got him his papers from France, a court-approved certificate, everything. He refused. He was a Czech."