Vladimír Zajíc

“He’d got all the way to Omsk. That was in Siberia. He was held captive in Omsk for three years. Selecting the captives [for work] went something like this: they gathered them up in the district centre of the governorate, the mujiks came along on sledges and started choosing. Everyone had to hold out their hands and show their palms. ‘Whitehands’, those who weren’t calloused - they didn’t want those. In the end [my father] said: ‘So they divided us up, and us blacksmiths and carpenters by craft, we ended up quite well. Those were poor people in the villages. The teacher went with us, because when the highbrows remained in the row, the one’s who weren’t calloused, a cossack came riding up, hit the mujik with his whip and said: You’ve got ten workers, you get one whitehand and no excuses.’ ”

“The graduation was a glorious and inglorious event. A month before the headmaster of the academy called me and fourteen others to his office and said: ‘Gentlemen, I must inform you that unfortunately you will not graduate as army officers, but as police officers, as you are members of the ministry of the interior.’ I was dumbfounded. I had returned my badge, I had returned my uniform, I had returned my pistol, I had sent a written request to the gendarmerie headquarters in Újezd - and nothing. In all the tumult of the revolution someone had decided to ditch his responsibilities. Or maybe someone at the ministry of interior had said: ‘So we’ll have officers with military education. That could be useful.’ Because it didn’t cost them a thing. And we were dumbstruck.”

“In the end we found a shed containing a fireplace, some bloodied bandages and so on - only we’d arrived too late. That was to be the second den. We were pushing our way down to the train station, and they had continued on through the foothills of the High Tatras. That was unfortunate, because if we’d have began the search the second day, we would’ve stopped them, because like this it was the poor interns in Magura-Ľupča that copped it. Then we had Burlak passing through, that was a thing. Burlak’s gang consisted of some 80 to 120 people, but then they split up into small groups. That was the worst.”

“We lived in the school in Kraskov, and the people who had [the partisans] coming to them asked us to guard in the night. You can imagine.” (Q: “How many of you were there from Hradec Králové? A whole detachment?”) “A whole detachment. Me and one boy came to one lady, and there I saw something amazing. They had lights shining, I don’t know if it was gas or what, and she was making [gas] mantles. We came there and she said: ‘Well come on, come, so I don’t have to be afraid.’ One word led to the next, and so we said: ‘Missus, we’re so frightened that they might come here. What should we do?’ She said: ‘Don’t worry, they don’t usually come [a second time] where they’ve already been.’ Which wasn’t true. Later on we realised that she probably must have told them we would be there, so they wouldn’t come.”