Miroslav Brebera

“We were ordered to dig anti-tank trenches underneath that hill. It was a huge ditch, about a meter and a half deep. We would pile mud in front of it and drive stakes into the ground. The trench was about five meters wide. The tanks would slump into the trench. We spent all the time digging these trenches, all of March, all the way till about April 20, when the frontline started approaching our position. At night, you could see the flashes from the airplanes and that terrible roar.”

“I don’t remember yet whether it was at noon or before. All of a sudden, a railroad worker came and told us about a train loaded with coal. He suggested to us to hide in the coal. So we buried ourselves in the coal. The train was dispatched from Ostrava to the west, Třebová and so on. We were up to our chins buried in the coal. The train rolled out of the station and it kept going and going, until it crossed the border to the Reich. We arrived in Müglitz (Mohelnice), there were soldiers all over the train station and they searched the cars of the train. The dogs started barking and digging us out of the coal. They discovered us and arrested us. They were thinking what to do with and finally decided that they’d have to hand us over to the Gestapo. So we slept over in Mohelnice and in the morning, we were taken back to Olomouc to the Gestapo.”

“It was raining cats and dogs. There wasn’t much happening but all of a sudden, military trucks arrived in the square and German soldiers jumped out of them. Our school building was located on the square so we got a good sight of what was going on. Because of the propaganda, they thought that Czechoslovakia was impoverished and miserable and thus they brought everything with them, including a field kitchen. They started handing out eintopf. Otta Hrabinec, our teacher and gym teacher, told us: ‘Don’t you dare to talk to the soldiers or take anything from them. Ignore them as if they weren’t there’.”

“We had badges that had GUARD written on them. It was a huge POW camp where they sorted the prisoners. The Austrians were put aside. Then they dealt with the SS-men. They were put aside and the rest went somewhere else. I have no idea what they then did with them in Čáslav. 10 000 POWs came from Náchod, 10 000 from Hradec. They didn’t get farther. There was a huge detention camp in Čáslav.”