"The Swedes didn’t want us in Sweden at all. So we had to carry on to the north by train, where is a border town called Haparanda. It is located between Sweden and Finland. In Finland they have agreed that I wasn’t able to travel any longer so the local Jewish associations took me under their wings. And I got in one nice family where they took good care of me. Just when I got a little better they put me in another family. One of the family members told me: „Wait a minute, we know where Mistek is. My cousin lived there! “What a mere coincidence! And so we got really great along because of this fact. All my life was full of coincidence if I think of it now."
"The flood in Dunkerque wasn’t really pleasant either. When we arrived to Dunkerque we settled there. We made some ditches, then we had to lift the tanks a little up, so they could fire to longer distances. Nearby there were some abandoned farms where we stayed. And all of a sudden the ground water appeared all over. So we called the firemen from the surrounded villages to drain the water, but the water just came back in a little while again."
"They also gave us some money so we can write letter at home while we still could, because Turkey was non-aligned country. I wanted to send one letter also to Denmark to let them know where I was and how I was doing. And after the end of the war we found out that the people to whom we gave the letters and the money for the mailing service kept all the money and that our letters have never been sent. But that we found out only after the war.”
"I have served by the 200th anti-aerial regiment. I was operating the automatic cannon called Bofors. This gun was being loaded from the top. There were four bullets in one clip. One soldier was standing on the ground and was passing the bullets from the container to the loader who was standing on the Bofor´s platform and was loading the bullets down the cannon. It looked like... You know the top loaders? A machine gun or rifle has the bottom loader. But machine cannon had the top loader. The loader operator had to be very fast, because that cannon could fire as many as 80 times per minute."
"So I got on this Danish farm in 1939. They took great care of us there. Even today we’re still in touch with their children.
And when they were younger they came for a visit. You have to understand, that we’re all over eighty now and those people, who took care of us in Denmark are unfortunately already dead. But we kept writing to each other for a long time."
"There was no place to stay there (in Torbruk - editor’s note). We simply stayed in shelters we made ourselves. We dug out a hole, found some logs or woods although there wasn’t much wood around too. Then we put some sheet over it and covered it all with dirt. That’s how we lived there. Some warm cozy place - that just didn’t exist. We had to be careful when it was raining though, because our trucks were standing on the muddy, sand like ground someone could easily drown there. The water was all over, it didn’t have time to seep, so it was running through the wadi straight into the sea."
Mr. Gerhard Singer was born on June 9th 1923 in Mistek (present Frydek-Mistek town). He comes from Jewish family. He lost his relatives during the holocaust. His parents arranged an escape to Denmark in 1939 for him. From here he continued his run away trip via Scandinavia and former Soviet Union all the way to Palestine. There in the Middle East he underwent the military training and was sent to Africa, where he fought in Tobruk waterfront. In 1942 he left to Great Britain on the Mauritania ship, where he got trained to be a tank operator and he participated in Dunkerque battles. After the end of the war he returned back to Czechoslovakia. He graduated on the Faculty of law, but he stayed in the field only shortly. As a western private he had to choose some of the * blue collar* jobs therefore he became an electrician.
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!
