“The fighter planes were flying incredibly low. They were in swarms and they shot at everything that moved. These air raids were terrible. They were mostly after freight trains. The pilots were often colored people. They would fly very low just above the train and shoot it to pieces. They riddled it with bullets. They wanted to hamper the German war efforts. I remember that one train transport – I think these people were Hungarians. They were carrying all sorts of things with them. They got attacked by these squads and we went there to observe that spectacle. We saw dead horses scattered around the scene. Some of them had just been wounded, they weren’t dead, yet. There was a forest not far away from the place and some of them made it there. The fighters would always make a circle above the place and then come back and open fire again. I remember that there was a pregnant woman there with two little children. They shot her. She was lying dead there. A butcher from Přeclavice came there to finish those horses that had been wounded off. He liquidated everything.”
“The Germans were on a ransack campaign in the countryside. They were searching village after village for people who might have been involved in the assassination of Heydrich. They searched every hay stack, piercing it with a pitchfork. They came to our village as well and they searched the house of my neighbor, a blacksmith. They came into every room and opened every closet, looking for weapons. I was there, witnessed it myself. There were two German soldiers searching that room. One of them left and the other stayed and searched on. He searched the wardrobe, searched the clothes and suddenly found a shotgun that the blacksmith was hiding there. He pulled out that shotgun and stared at it for a long time. It was a simple soldier. He then looked at us then he put the shotgun back on its place where it had been. He didn’t say a word about it. If he had told about it, the blacksmith would have been shot. People got shot for this every day. So we were very surprised by the kindness of that soldier. There were good people even in the Wehrmacht. They didn’t agree with the war but had to fight.”
“It happened at a different unit, I even don’t know which one it was. He served with the border guard as well. Once, he went with his commander for an inspection of the frontier. These were stretches of land where you sat for two or three hours just watching. They were just at the border line. And he went to check if the boys were carrying out their duties properly – if they were on guard or not. That was pretty courageous. They were pulling their machine guns the moment something moved. They went together to check on them and they came to a place that’s called ‘styk’ (contact). That fool shot his commander there and ran away across the state border. He crossed the border through an underpass and gone he was. Then there was no way they could have caught him anymore.” Interviewer: “What about you, have you ever been across the border?”
“Yes, I was. I jumped there and they told me: ‘you fool, we thought that you are going to run away’. I said: ‘sure, to be able to say that I’ve been in Germany’. So I jumped across a creek and I was in Germany. Afterwards, we had to patrol in threes. Before the problem with Řanda, we could go in pairs but then they changed it and we had to be three. If you tried to run away, your friends had to shoot you. If they didn’t, they’d put you them in cruel jail for three years. So what were they supposed to do.”
Josef Nedvěd, a retired private, was born on 19 June, 1931, in the village of Bohunice. During the war, his sister worked as a slave laborer in Kassel. During the repressions following the assassination of Heydrich, he personally witnessed an incident, when a German soldier didn‘t report a shotgun that he had found during a search taking place at his neighbor‘s place, whereby he saved that neighbor‘s life. He also recalls the arrival of the U.S. Army and of the Russian soldiers, who at the end of the war were allegedly looking for and shooting German soldiers who were hiding in the forests. After the war, in 1952, he entered the military service of the Border Guard. He completed his basic military training at a military training facility near the castle of Velhartice and then served for one year at the border. He also remembers one incident that happened during his time of service. The incident happened in a different company of the Border Guard. A private by the name of Řanda shot a young lieutenant and then fled across the border himself. During the same period, the border was secured by army engineers. After one year, he was transferred to the Slovak town of Šamorín, where he trained horses for the border guard. In the absence of veterinarians, he would even perform veterinary tasks. When he was returning home, he fell behind his colleagues as he stopped at home to pick up his civilian clothes. This led to the State Police being alerted on suspicion of a possible illegal border crossing. He spent two years and seven months in military service. After the war he worked in a foundry.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
