First Lieutenant (ret.) Josef Načeradský

“It was preparation for the war. They installed a telephone line for me and gave me everything I needed. Everything was calm. The major and the colonel went to sleep at eleven o’clock and they ordered me: ‘Keep an eye on it and do not wake us up! Only if the war breaks out.’ The war didn’t break out and so I didn’t have to wake them. But one time I did something that was probably against the orders. At two o’clock at night the telephone rang and somebody – later I found out that it was a friend who had served in the officers’ school with me – called that some Germans fired at them from the forest and he asked me what they ought to do. I replied: ‘Wait, I’ll ask.’ Then I thought: ‘Is this war? No.’ I thus picked up the phone again and said: ‘Do this: The company which is in charge of it should be on stand-bye. Do not send your people to the forest under any circumstances. It’s dark there and people would get killed there.’”

“I remember that when I was five years old, I was sitting behind my father’s neck, it was some days after October 28th, (1918) in Štěpánov, the place where I was born, and the people were taking down the symbol of Austrian eagle from the administration building there. My father carried me and I watched it. Apart from that, I was not involved in any other activity against the Emperor.”

“I became the commander for recruiting horses. Farmers had to bring their horses and give them at the army’s disposal. I told them: ‘But I don’t understand horses.’ A warrant officer was assigned to me: ‘We’ll manage.’ Well, it was him who managed it. I was only signing documents. We thus recruited the horses and the task was done. That’s all there’s to say about it. I came back and again I had nothing to do for two days. Nothing came out of it.”

“Of course, I confessed the names of all the people whom they had already arrested. These people had agreed to do the same. But then the conspiracy broke out. It was not possible to endure it. It was useless to deny the allegations. But I have not told them the names of others. Like Mixa, for example. They were beating me for fifteen minutes because of Mixa. I didn’t tell them, I only said: ‘He is a traitor.’ They had suspected that, but they said: ‘And Lesák, from Divišov.’ They were beating me because of him, too. And so on. I got beaten, I had to undress completely, and they were beating me again and again. They put a bag over my head. One time I felt as if I was lying on the ground and watching them beating me, and I didn’t feel anything. But as I said, I had to be carried to the cell upstairs by the other guys.”

“We were sitting in the pub and having good time when the mobilisation was declared. The mood among the soldiers was that we should go for it and beat them to death with our hats, and so on. The regiment’s commander called us and told us: ‘Gentlemen, go to the soldiers and explain to them that it is not possible. An order came that we are not to do anything.’ That is the question: whether we should have started fighting or not. I could not agree on this matter with general (Vlastimil) Picek. He claimed that we should have gone into the war, and I said that we should not have. I told him: ‘General, I served in the counterespionage unit at that time. I knew how things were. The Germans knew everything about us - they knew about every depot, they knew the location of everything we had. We did have an excellent system of fortifications, but it was for nothing. They could overcome it with airplanes. And they had a free way from the south, from Austria. The Hungarians were not on friendly terms with us, either. The Slovaks didn’t know what they were doing at that time, and neither the Poles were too friendly.’”

“Each of us had to sleep on the side in order to fit in there. When somebody went to the toilet at night, he had to step on the bodies of others. People suffered from diarrhoea and so on. I was lucky because when I came there, my place to sleep was next to a pillar, and there was a little table next to it, and another prisoner slept under the table. People were disciplined: nobody would take a place for sleeping which belonged to somebody else. This prisoner slept under that table and then he died. Every night, four or five people from our cell would die. I thus moved to the place under the table. But there was another man who slept on top of the table, and he had many lice, and the lice were dropping down on me.”