Vítězslav Keller

“Those weren’t just any kind of soldier. One of them, he was in the reserves, and he was called up to serve as an officer. And he did and was released again. He had a little factory where he made potato harvesters even in the wartime. That was a kind of rarity. The second uncle, Vojtěch Švantner, he was a munitions specialist, and he fled to Slovakia and taught their munitions experts there until the end of the war, and then he stayed there and didn’t return until he was pensioned sometime in the seventies. And the the third uncle had the worst fate of all. That was my uncle Pepa Kraus. Back then he was a Lieutenant Colonel of the General Staff in charge of artillery. Among other things, he was in touch with the Russians, whom we supplied big guns, blueprints, and production machines to, but at a certain moment during the purges in the Red Army, things got stuck. Well, and this uncle joined the resistance, but they were soon found out or betrayed, and in 1941 he was executed in Dresden.”

“They certainly was – maybe not among the pupils but among the teaching staff, which, I would say, had suffered two blows. One under Germany, when teachers were sent to concentration camps, and a second in ’48, when several teachers were suspended and replaced by others, some capable, some not so capable. This fact on its own, right, created a kind of depressive atmosphere among the pupils, so I’d say that the kind of enthusiasm that was envisaged by that simplistic kind of campaigning, I’d say, it didn’t have a very broad reception at the grammar school. I don’t remember us signing any manifestos or anything like that, but it had a certain reach. Because in the seventh or eighth year [of the eight-year secondary programme - trans.], in November or October, we were suddenly pulled out of the school and sent to build the road from Mirošov to Padrť. We built the road there for black coffee and bread, as that’s really what we got for breakfast there, and we built it well.”

“It wasn’t quite as drastic in Dobřany as in some other places in the border regions, where there was shooting and all kinds of excesses, but you could tell something was going on. It was almost comical because those young Nazis used to meet up in Ševt’s pub, which was by the train station, and they’d get a bit tipsy there, of course, so they’d light torches and march willy nilly through the town, just calling out things, perhaps some minor clashes, but they didn’t dare do much more because there was half a regiment of dragoons stationed there; one half was in Klatovy and the other was in Dobřany, so they were also afraid of the soldiers’ intervention.”

“We had an ugly experience on Monday the 7th, when an SS troop marched through the village with four hay carts in tow, which were driven by farmers from Olešná near Hořovice, which they had requisitioned because they had run out of petrol, so they loaded all the heavy weapons, rations, and ammunition up on to the hay carts and took them with them. They passed through the village, and that was a bad feeling. Then by the forest, about a kilometre and a half away, they equipped themselves and released the farmers. The farmers were completely shocked because it often happened that they would shoot [the helpers] instead of releasing them. And a kind of rare occurence was that many many years later I met one of those farmers from Olešná near Hořovice. So we reminisced. The Germans were in quite a fighting mood, so they started digging trenches and laying mines on the road. Well, and then suddenly a light-armoured recon car drove up, so there was a bit of a firefight. And it drove off again. And then tanks started coming out of the forest. A forester had taken them there and led them through the forest. So [the Germans] definitively surrendered then. As an added bonus, there was one German tank that just drove up and stopped on the crossroads and still had a kind of fighting spirit. So then when the SS surrendered, my father persuaded them into giving up too, so they dropped their weapons, and then the Americans captured them.”