Miroslav Václavek

“Talking about the topic, the fighting there was really long and very hard. So at the time of the fighting for South Moravia and precisely for Veselí nad Moravou, my grandfather built a bunker in the forest where they hid for two or three weeks. Until the horror ends. And my father has a brother who is ten years younger and who was little at that time, he was a year and something old. And because they were there for a long time, it happened that grandmother ran out of milk and needed to get some somewhere because he had nothing to eat, so she went there along the bank of the Morava River, and there were Germans on one bank and Romanians on the other, because Veselí nad Moravou was liberated by the Romanian Armed Forces, and they were fighting there. My grandmother was walking there and she had my little uncle with her, she was carrying him in her arms and showing them that she went to get some milk. And they stopped the fire and she walked through the front line to Veselí to get some milk and food and the same way back. She showed again that she was carrying a child and food, they again stopped murdering each other for a while and she walked again to the bunker where they hid, I don´t know for how many more days.

“As I have already mentioned, we lived on a street that was the exit to Bruntál, where the headquarters of the division of the Central Group of Soviet Forces was located and there was a rather large garrison there. Moreover, Bruntál, in general, was a bastion of communists, all sorts of people came there after the occupation, it was horrible, terrible, and dreadful. But considering the fact that the occupational army, the Russians had a lot of transports, they were transferring somewhere all the time. They had the huge so-called Gruzavik cars and when they were driving them, it smelled weird, I do not know what they used as fuel, but the smell was different from the smell of a normal engine. They did not have anything normal, they always had something special. And the cars were of course mediocre quality even though they copied American Studebaker cars from WWII, the Russian quality is obviously proverbial and I mean that in the figurative sense The cars stood more than they drove. There was a convoy, let's say thirty cars, and I think five of them would make it to the destination. There were some cars left behind on the side of the road. It often happened that a broken Gruzavik was standing in front of our house. An Asian was running around it in a shabby uniform and a Russian officer was giving him orders. Once, when it happened, I got really mad. I had an air rifle at home which shot really well. I earned money to buy shots by collecting rubbish, we would always find for instance some electrical cables somewhere, burned them off, and sell them and I would buy shots for the money, not pellets but shots because of course, pellets are not as good. And a Russian Gruzavik stopped there one day. And they were repairing and repairing and I took my air rifle, climbed upstairs because there was quite a big attic in the house, those were genuinely nice German houses, and the living conditions there were great. They were brick houses, of course. So I went upstairs, there were dormer windows in the attic and I opened the window and I had a box of shots with me and I started to fire at them. I shot through the tilt. It was in winter, so you could see that ice was flying off when I shot, and they were totally freaked out, weren't they. I shot through the tilt, the side window, I put holes in the bodywork, and they were nervous, wondering what was going on. They were running around, I of course hid every time, and every time they could not see me, I fired more. And my mum then saw it, she noticed that someone was shooting at their car and she quickly did the maths: Mirek is not here, the air rifle is not here and someone is shooting at the Russians, the result was pretty clear. So she ran upstairs, found me there, and slapped me, so I ended the fire, but I would wish everybody to experience the feeling when you can shoot at the bastards. I only regretted the fact that I did not have anything better.”