"We didn't even feel there was a war from the beginning. Of course, because I lived by the railway line, there were frequent military transports, so I saw that the troops were moving and there were also those transport, infirmary trains. And until the 1942 before the assassination of Heydrich was committed, in May, it was quite ok with those soldiers, we didn't even feel any big harm. However, then in the year 1942, when Reinhard Heydrich, who was then assassinated in Liben, died, the situation began to worsen. At first, but that was probably before the assassination, they began to take away our Jewish fellow citizens. Because they were our friends, we suddenly saw that they came to school and had a yellow star on the left sleeve. Then they weren't even allowed to go to school and suddenly they got lost and we didn't know what happened to them. And then again the German friends, because there were also several German families and they also had children, probably at our age, so they also left, because for them again there was Hitler's youth, the Hitlerjugend, the kind of organization in which they were raised. According to the German style. So they started going around in those brown shirts and with those belts, they had their school, so that is how we grew away. Although we got along quite well with those soldiers, with the normal ones. Even some of the girls went there with them, from Roztoky, but it was impossible for some of the girls to marry them there, because they were not good enough for the Nordic race at the time, as they said. After all, they were Slavs."
"Then, when the newcomers came there in November of 1953, Švandrlík, the author of the Black Barons, also came among them. And we… when they arrived, the train came with them again, they came again from the station, again like us, they were also sauntering there, so we went to look at them. When they came to the lower courtyard, we went to look there. We looked at them, we felt sorry for them, but… it was not that bad for us there. And I had no idea that Švandrlík would be among them, with whom I slept in the other room almost the whole year. And we were friends, and Švandrlík then got such a special commission that he was with those pigs. The pigs, they were really there, but they were underneath the church, it wasn't in the Šternberk, in the farm buildings, as it was in the Black Barons: but it was underneath the church where there was a wooden, they called it a hunting cottage, where when there were hunts in times of the nobility, the hunters had dogs there. So, there he had the pigs then and upstairs there was a banister, upstairs at the church, and there the Gazda, the commander, the Terazka, stood there licking his mouth, watching… and I witnessed… how the pigs were well. He said, 'I noticed the feeding of those pigs, they ate the grass and pushed the snout through the fence. Cut the grass and give it to them.‘ He always plucked a piece of grass, gave it to them, and the pigs ate it, so he thought they were hungry. But mostly they fed them with the leftovers from the kitchen. That was the fate of that Švandrlík."
"At the turn of April and May, in 1945, the so-called transport of death arrived in Roztoky from Terezín. It was a train that had about thirty-five uncovered wagons, they call it cattle truck, but they were not cattle trucks, because those have a roof. These were open wagons, and in each of those wagons there were maybe fifty or sixty prisoners. Men were separate there, women were separate… they had nothing with them, only the clothes they were wearing and perhaps a blanket. And only the happier ones had a can on a wire, and they threw it over the edge of the wagon and waited for someone to give them something. Well, because the transport of death was to pass through Roztoky, it was already known that it would be there. Originally, it was supposed to stand there for about two hours, but it stood there for about two days, so that everyone could prepare some food so that we could give it to the prisoners. Well, of course I could not miss it. I think that it was probably on Saturday, because we had sweet buns. So I took three of those buns and immediately ran there, because it was only for a while, we didn't have an hour there. Well, so I waited, too, and when the train arrived people were throwing it into the wagons there, because it wasn't for sure that the train would stop there. Well, I threw the buns there too, and as I was throwing it, I threw the buns over the wagons. Neither of them fell into the car, but they must have picked it up from the other side when they could get out. Well, the transport of death stopped there, because there was typhus among the prisoners, so some of the sick prisoners were requested by a local group of the Red Cross and they made such a temporary hospital for them there in Roztoky, from one of the schools, it was a former poorhouse where we went."
Bohuslav Šotola was born on November 20, 1931 in Prague. He spent his childhood in Roztoky near Prague, in a railway house on a busy railway line Prague - Ústí nad Labem. His father was a dispatcher at the Roztoky railway station. He started going to school shortly before the start of World War II, and at the end of the year he witnessed an event that was directly related to Roztoky railway station. At the end of April 1945, a transport train with thousands of prisoners from a concentration camp in Litoměřice stopped in Roztoky. It was to continue to the extermination camp in Mauthausen. However, the head of the Roztoky railway station managed to delay the train there until the next day, and a large part of the people began to help the prisoners with immense courage and solidarity. They brought them food and water, and quickly set up a cooking facility and a temporary hospital. In the purposeful confusion, they helped to some of the prisoners to escape and subsequently hid them. As a fourteen-year-old, Bohuslav Šotola also tried to bring food to prisoners. After the war, he trained as a carpenter and in November 1952 he began the basic military service. He served there with the Technical Battalions in the barracks at the Zelená Hora chateau near Nepomuk. He also spent part of the war in Janovice nad Úhlavou. He served a year in Zelená Hora with Miloslav Švandrlík, the author of the well-known novel The Black Barons. Bohuslav Šotola got married after the war and moved to Nepomuk, where he still lives. He worked as a carpenter and external teacher at a driving school. His greatest hobbies include an extensive collection of old postcards. He has organized dozens of thematically focused exhibitions, thanks to which he manages to document the changes in the Czech landscape.
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!
