“They told me I had to travel under a train, that it´s the way they do it. So they first draw it for me on a piece of paper and then they took me to the station where they showed me the train. In those days there were large steam engines so I couldn´t lie just next to it because I could be blinded by the steam being exhausted. I also had to lie with my head in the direction which the train was heading, so I could take a proper grip, otherwise I would have got swept down. Because the steel board I was lying on was slippery. A toilet was above it and everything from there splashed right on me, in my face. But I still had to keep my head to the front otherwise I would have slipped and would have turned into a hamburger. But they caught me in Genoa. First they thought I was a spy, so they took me to the court. But they didn´t hand me over back to protectorate though they knew I was Jewish. I told the police president who interrogated me about the death of my father and it moved him a lot. He said: ´Your mother is in Prague, so we will send you back to Prague.´ And I told him: ´So you better shoot me right now and you will spare that journey.´ He shouted at me terribly, but only for the people outside in the corridor to think he was being strict with me. So I was only sent to prison and later to a camp for the prisoners of war. That was because they found a demobilising document by me."
As prisoners of war we didn´t have to go to war any more. But we decided to join voluntarily. I wanted to the Czechoslovakian air force in England and a friend of mine went to the Polish army which was progressing together with British eighth army towards Rome. He died later at Monte Cassino. When I have recently seen the film “Saving Private Ryan”, I really identified with the elderly man who came to visit the graves of those who saved his life. I also cried in front of my friend´s grave. His name was Zbigniew Jakoubek."
“During my second escape we, me and my friend, who was later killed by Monte casino, were walking inside a river to prevent dogs from following us. While wading he cut his toe. We were really skinny and we lived just on unripe grapes and figs and we had low immunity. His wound got inflamed immediately. In that region, in La Silla mountain range, there are no villages, just individual houses. And, because he couldn´t go on, he decided to go to one of them the following day to surrender and I was supposed to continue on my own. But I told him I´d have a look at his foot once again. We took some “weapons” from the kitchen when we were escaping, a kitchen knife and an axe. I cut the ball of his inflamed toe, pus sprang out, it was completely black and my friend fainted. I pressed everything out of the wound, then washed it with water and put facings on his groin nodules. Then I fell asleep and when I woke up in the morning I could see him jumping on his heels saying that it had got a little better. So we decided to raid that house to get some food. I knocked the door and a biblical figure emerged. A handsome elderly man with his hair and beard still black. I raised the axe shouting: ´Give us, sir, uove, vino mangare´ but I didn´t impress him much. He quietly pushed my arm down again and stood away from the door saying: ´Entrate – enter, we are all children of Jesus Christ. When we entered, there were women and children everywhere and they started shouting and lamenting. They didn´t feel fear but compassion. We didn´t have shirts just an Italian military blanket, our ribs were visible on us. The man of this house gave us food, matches and a gun, a double barrel scatter gun, so we could shoot birds on our way. He only asked us to give it back to him, which we actually did one day.”
“After the war I could choose whether to go to my brother in America or to return home. When we later landed in Ruzyně there was a small group of us, people whom nobody waited for. And this was really very sad. Really desperate. And there were not only Jews who stood there alone but also Czechs whose families were murdered in Svatobořice. That was a concentration camp for the people about whom the Nazis knew that they had relatives fighting in England.”
"On 6. April when the Germans attacked Yugoslavia where we took refuge from them, my father killed himself. I swam over Sava the following day and arrived to Terst. There some Slovenians who had a dairy factory hid me although they didn´t know me at all. They contacted me with certain Montenegro people. I think they were with Mihajlovic who was fighting the Germans and Tito at the same time. They advised me to keep going on. I wanted to the non occupied part of France, because I knew there were some Czechoslovaks in Marseille who have some ways how to get a person to north Africa and then to England."
„Já jsem odešel začátkem roku 1940 a nechal jsem tu maminku a babičku. Bratra jsem měl v Americe. Dostal stipendium na Harvardskou univerzitu a stačil odjet týden před okupací. Otec jel do Jugoslávie a já jsem jel za ním. Tady jsem nechal svou dívku, kterou jsem miloval… Já jsem si vždycky myslel, že tahle země se hájit musí. Ale pokud jste mi dal tu otázku, jestli se tenkrát (v roce 1938, pozn. ed.) mělo bojovat, tak na to odpovídám. ,Já myslím, že Beneš dělal správně.´“
Jan Wiener, a retired colonel, was born on 26.May 1920 in Hamburg. He grew up in a Czech-German Jewish family in Prague, at home they used to speak German. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia he escaped to Yugoslavia (1940), after it was attacked he wanted to cross Italy to get to Marseille, where certain Czechs lived who helped their countrymen to emigrate to north Africa. In Italy he was captured, though, he escaped two times and his second escape was successful. He crossed the front in southern Italy and got to the Allies. He joined the air force and remained there for the rest of the war, in the RAF´s 311. Czechoslovakian bombing squadron. After the war he returned to Czechoslovakia, spent five years in a communistic prison, then he emigrated to USA. In the last period of his life he lived both in the USA and the Czech Republic, teached history at several universities. In 2001 he was awarded the medal „Za zásluhy“ 1. stupně (Distinguished Service Medal of the First Grade). He died on November 24th 2010 in Prague.
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!
