Ing. Václav Zábrša

"We were in the PTP for about six months and suddenly we were a TP, Technical Battalion, not an auxiliary. Of course, that just meant that we were safe. PTP also meant, and this was the worst thing, that they had to check you to even let you into civilian life. So when I came to Stochov, that's where Lány is, you had guys from the neighboring villages who didn't get checked, and they were already in their fourth year there. I knew one from the neighbouring village of Meziboří, and he told me that he had been there thirty-nine months at that 57. PTP. But in May fifty-four they let them go home. And for us that meant we were TPs, but we stayed in the mines for another two years, but we knew that in two years they would let us go home. TP is what Švandrlík described in The Black Barons. I've studied it all. Back when we were in the PTP, there was also TP. They worked, but they didn't have that category E, untested, that they wouldn't let him out of the army. They Black Barons were TP and the filmmakers got it mixed up there, but that's another chapter. I was in the mines for twenty-six months in the army and then it was a different phase with my studies."

"We were fooling around. It was after the war and there were rolling everywhere... there were many fatal accidents in Vysočina. We were lucky. There were these cartridges, light rockets. We knew how to do it because the older guys showed us that you could gut it from the top, that there was a wick and that when you lit it and the rocket was put on the road, it would go off and the light would fly. That was exciting for us. One time we were gutting this rocket and we still couldn't find the wick. There were three of us, and one of us was holding it in his hand and dumping it out in our yard. Now we lit it on fire, and it was on fire, and he was holding it in his hand, and as it caught fire on the concrete, it went into the cartridge he was holding and it exploded. It tore. It was metal and he lost one and a half fingers and the two of us standing over him got some shrapnel. I had about ten of them - in my hands, on my chest, on my leg. I still have scars to this day. And the other one had a similar one. Then we went to Dolní Rožínka to the doctor with the horses, and the one who lost his fingers went to the hospital, and we came back and got better at home. We were lucky."

"The partisans in Vysočina, when the war ended, they were pulling back. In our field by the barn around the 16th of May, there were 5,000, roughly, it was said, 5,000 German prisoners of war who were walking towards Brno. They spent one night in the field by our barn. They pulled straw out of the barn to sleep on until morning and then we cleaned up after them. They led them to Brno. And about a week later, the partisans from Vysočina were after them again. They stopped by us too, maybe twenty of them, and a tragedy happened. I had two sisters. The younger one may have been raped by a Russian soldier earlier. And the older one, when they were there for lunch and we hosted them there and the girls were serving them, they were talking to them and one partisan was always there handling a gun and showing it. It went off and he shot my sister in the side, in the stomach. She had a lot of trouble after that, and they operated on her in Nové Město na Moravě about twice to get her out of it. And she survived. So that's the war."