Filip Paulech

“The communists took over and those, who were founding the communist party in Moravany, those were the worst possible jerks of the world. For example, one was a goat shepherd and his name was Konečný. He had more children and lived quite immorally. He had a child with his own daughter and so on. Back then, I was already a youngster and there were elections of members into the local national committee. It was a public meeting. I heard that they were going to appoint even the shepherd Konečný to be the member, so I spoke out he was a thief robbing granaries, being imprisoned several times. I just asked how the village can be represented by a man who cannot maintain his own household. When I began grouching, others continued. Then after the meeting, a party's secretary stopped me and said: 'You just wait! We shall remember when you stood up against us!' I asked whom I stood against and he replied that against the party, thus they shall have remembered me. So they remembered when writing an evaluation report on me, on a faithful man going to church. That this way I was just making fun of the communist party and the like. So I received such a bad personal report from the village, according to which I then had to enlist in the Auxiliary Technical Battalion.”

“We had to work under a horrible terror. When our trolleys were empty, we had to run back to the place of excavation. And of course, the rails had such couplings and bumps. As we were running along those rails, we hit the lump and derailed the trolley. There were just two of us and we didn't have enough strength to lift the trolley back on its rails. The lieutenant being a commander of the company took out his gun and screamed, 'I shall shoot you like dogs! You think you can sabotage it here? You are politically unreliable, so when I shoot you, nothing happens!' That's what he yelled at me in Czech. He was an officer who supposedly came with General Svoboda up to Prague. They liberated Prague and then he happened to be the commander of our company. His name was lieutenant Terelia.”