Miroslav Pospíšil

"I received the draft notice: Report immediately for a military exercise. My wife was due at that time, were expecting the birth of our second daughter. I told them that I could not go and leave her at home alone. They said that I needed to go to Šumperk to the army command and that they might hopefully let me go back immediately. And so I didn't even take my shaving kit or anything like that. I came to the command and I got yelled at terribly. By coincidence, the guy who was the commander there had lived in our house during the war after his marriage, and then in the 1950s he was promoted a major from a private. He yelled at me what the hell was I thinking: Once I was drafted to the army, there were no regards whatsoever. I should have taken all my necessary things with me, he shouted. He didn’t let me go home. At night we were transported in cars to Moravský Krumlov."

"The car came all the way to Lhota. The partisans were already there and they were celebrating the liberation. Now they saw this German car and began shooting at it. But they didn’t notice that a messenger on a motorcycle was riding behind the car. When the messenger saw the gunfight with the partisans he turned around and went to Hostice for reinforcements. It looked like they would burn the whole village down, both Hostice and Lhota. They gathered all men from Hostice and locked them up in one house with a garden and a fence around it, and guarded them there. There was the village mayor. He was a Czech, but he spoke German well. He went to see the mayor of the village of Ruda. The other mayor was a German who could speak Czech. This Mr. Straka interceded with him and explained that it was a misunderstanding between the partisans in Lhota and that things got messed up. The men were then released after several hours. The front has passed in the meantime and nothing more happened."

"It was the end of October and it was already cold when we were transported from Domašov nad Bystřicí. We went by train and we were met there by a truck from Libavá. The truck was open, it was cold out there and we didn’t even have proper clothing. We arrived to Libavá. Getting the uniforms was quite an experience. Some of them were still stained with blood. There were insignia with German Eagles on them, or there were English uniforms, too. We just picked whatever was available for us. And we didn’t have proper shoes, either. The clothing was terrible. And so was the housing, I still remember how cold it was. There were small barracks and some of them were still uninhabited, because we were the first group of soldiers there."

"We were in Rajhrad and there was a good company of university graduates and priests. We did have to attend political lectures, conducted for us by professors from the university or from the political college, but usually it turned out so bad for them that they didn’t even endure for the whole lesson. They would always say something and our priests or professors who were educated in these things as well would always beat them: ´But you’re wrong, what you are saying here is not true. You ought to read this or that about it.´"