Richard Brhlík

“How he died: he and his colleagues were made staff members of the regional HQ, presumably for the Dukla region. As such, they were supposed to go out to the observation post one morning, because they had received the information that the Germans had fallen back on the other side of the valley, on the opposite slope. They climbed the lookout with binoculars, maps - you know, officers, the HQ staff and everything. The Germans were dug down in the opposite slope and they commenced mortar shelling. A wide, extensive, heavy mortar bombardment, which was aimed not only at the observation post, but at the whole hillside. There was shrapnel flying everywhere. Many soldiers and officers were cut up by shrapnel. My father had the misfortune of catching one of the shards directly in his chest, straight to the heart. He fell, and all he managed was to shout: ‘Oldo, help!’ at Staff Captain Oldřich Ševčík who stood next to him, ‘Oldo, help,’ and he was dead.”

“He believed - his diary shows that clearly - he believed the whole time, from when he en route from Palestine to England, the two years he was there, right until the end, in 1943, the entries he wrote with his own hand show how he longed for the war to end, and how he believed, maybe somewhat naïvely that, okay, the Russians had stopped Hitler before Moscow, so now things will go quickly and he could be back home by Christmas. That wasn’t true, however, not for another three Christmases. He had his sights set so amazingly clearly on getting home as soon as possible, no matter the cost, no matter the danger, just home, home, home.”

“Two or three days after his return to Bratislava, the ‘black-leather coats’ turned up in their big black boots and their big black hats. They were probably members of Hlinka’s Guard, and they arrested him just like that. They interrogated him for a long time, for months on end, I guess they tried to wear him down also mentally, so that he’d tell them what they wanted him to. Suffice it to say that the trial took place half a year later. Much to my surprise, the court found him guilty on only one of the three charges. They couldn’t prove the other two. But the one charge, that was deserting during peace time, was enough to land him with five months in prison, his ranks were stripped from him immediately, all his property was confiscated by the Slovak state - and his prison sentence was supposed to be high security, I don’t know what that meant at the time, but it’s written there: high security.”