Prof. MUDr., CSc. Josef Stingl

"One of my classmates was Slovenian on his mother's side, his father was a professional soldier, and he died soon after the war. His son and his mother continued to visit relatives in Yugoslavia. And this guy started dating a girl. He loved her very much. Her mother was German, a beautiful woman. Her father was originally Czech, I think he was a police officer, and then he was in the government army during the war and after the war he did a trade. And then the State Secret Police started following them. We had two policemen in Kraslice and we knew both of them, there was nothing to hide. The couple knew they were always being watched when dating at Glasberg. I was once interrogated for this in the headmaster's office. They asked me what I knew about it. I didn't say anything. They knew, I told them afterwards. The police invented a theory that a spy centre had been set up in Kraslice because the boy's mother was travelling to Yugoslavia on vacation, and to GDR (Bad Elster) for her joints treatment. And the girl visited her expelled aunt in West Germany. So they believed that the centre worked between the GDR, Yugoslavia, West Germany and Czechoslovakia. It was crazy. But the guy didn't get into the philosophy faculty because of that theory. They didn't take him, even though I was asked by the faculty to write a report on him. And I never wrote a better report in my life. Yet it failed. He studied at the faculty many years later. And strangely enough, the girl got into medicine, she studied with me in Pilsen. So she was okay."

"I spent the end of the war in my native village of Hradecko. I witnessed two red glows in the sky above Pilsen and Dresden when they were bombing them. We also heard a distant continuous thundering for a long time. It was strange, we had never heard anything like that before. Everybody said, 'It's the front thundering.' From a distance the artillery merged into a single tone, a strange, weird tone. Another thing was the condensation lines that we watched in the sky as the bombing raids were passing in different directions. The whole sky was humming. We couldn't even see the planes, they were too high. But the condensation lines were scary too. It was strange. But we still didn't fully understand until one day we were in the field with my grandfather and my mother. We were sowing, so the horse was harnessed to the mowing machine. The sowing took place in the field called Na Vrškách. And a short distance away, about a mile from us, there was a great farm of Hubenov, which once belonged to Metternich. And there were serpentine roads on the main road Pilsen - Žatec, and for many days German military convoys came down there towards the south. Continuously. Everybody was saying, 'They're going over to the Americans, to the south and to Bavaria, etc.' Suddenly five planes appeared and attacked the Germans, so we heard shooting at close range, we heard car explosions. My grandfather pulled the horse out, my mother held it standing in the field. My grandfather took me under his arm and hid me in the field, but I peeked to see it all. And so I watched everything, as they were flying at those German trucks, armoured cars, etc., shooting at them."