Karel Nováček

“On the first day they told us that we were indeed the elite of the army and for this reason we were selected to build socialism, namely by working in coal mines. When we went to work in the mine Hedvika the day after, we were shocked: the walls where we were to dig the coal were just eighty centimetres high. I developed lumbago right on the second day and I could not move. I went to the infirmary and the doctor told me that this problem is best cured by working. When we got used to the work about a month later, our commanders suddenly changed the course and they informed us that we were criminals and that we were there as a form of punishment and that we were to be transformed from reactionaries to people who support the communist regime. About a year later one of my friends suffered an injury and he was unable to work in the mine. He was on duty in the troop’s command and while he was in the office there, he came across some documents and he discovered the personal assessments written on each of us and we thus learnt the reason why we had been sent to this unit. The papers said that I came from a strongly religious family and that as a Boy Scout I was educating our youth in the bourgeois spirit. I realized that I really had nothing to be proud of because our family was truly unworthy: the state forced my parents to close down their shop, my uncle Eduard Dvořák was evicted from his farm as a kulak and my other uncle Cyril Dvořák spent ten years in prison for activity against the state, and as the sons of this family we were thus destined only for work in the mines and such.”

“When they read the notice to us that we were in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions for an indefinite period of time, we started going home illegally, without a leave permit. We had to be careful so that the military police would not catch us. I could never buy a ticket in Ostrava, because they would have caught me there. I would go to Brno, making transfers several times during the journey, and buy it only after I arrived to Brno. One day I went for an express train at five o’clock in the morning. The platform was very long and a sentry was approaching. I kept stepping back until I reached some two men who were sitting here. As I was passing them, I realized that the two were Václav Nahodil and Josef Vondrák, guys from Otín, from our village, and they were there doing a temporary job at night which they had been ordered to do as kulaks. I sat down between them, one of them gave me his winter coat and the other a hat – and I was saved.”

“We did not have any military training. They only taught us how to turn left and right and how to salute ‘Nazdar!’ (Hail!) We made use of this during one rally of the Auxiliary Technical Battalion members from the Ostrava-Karviná coal mining district in Karviná. There were about five thousand of us and we were standing in rows on the stadium since five o’clock and president Gottwald and minister Čepička arrived as late as nine o’clock. It was raining cats and dogs throughout the whole time and we looked like drowned rats. We were supposed to salute him loudly: ‘Nazdar, comrade president!’ Imagine, this ‘resounding salute’ - it looked as if only a hundred people instead of five thousand said something. It was such a shame that from then on they did not even allow us to leave the army barracks for a day leave and they stopped approving requests for leave as a punishment. They wanted to take a revenge on us so much.”