Karel Dohnal

“Partisans would usually conduct assaults there. Always at night. Because it was on the Vienna– Jihlava– route, and it was also there where they assaulted that commander of an anti-partisan commando from Žďár. They put a knife to his neck, saying he would either cooperate, or... They tied him and told him that they could take revenge on him by handing over these papers, claiming that he had given the papers to them. So choose whichever you want. The third option is cooperating with us. Because if the partisans had taken all his papers, they would have then claimed that he himself had handed them over to the partisans. They would have sent them to a certain place, and the Germans themselves would have arrested him. They didn’t give a damn about anything.”

“That’s the hitch, daddy was never a soldier.” – “He had some health-related reasons?” – “I don’t know, he somehow evaded it, he never wanted to talk much about it. He simply wasn’t in the army. All his friends were drafted in 1938 as Obrana národa when the mobilization came. This is how that section was called. They were mobilized and transferred to the country borders. And then there was the demobilization. And they returned from demobilization, and some of them just surrendered their weapons and went on. But some people, daddy’s friends and others, there are more of them, not only in Kněžice. In Kněžice there were 10 or 12 of them. They basically left the weapons in that old house we had, because my father hadn’t been in the army and thus there was no risk he would be checked upon and the firearms searched for. I saw these rifles. There was the mark of crossed swords on the rifle butts, the Czechoslovak army symbol, and the iron hobs which these army weapons have. I was a little boy and I went to see our neighbour, certain Rudolf Adam, who lived next door. I told him: ´Hey, we got so many firearms at home, we’ll go rabbit-hunting!´”

“I was going to school at that time, so I wasn’t aware of it. Only at the end of the war, when I already knew that some of dad’s friends went to do forced labour in the Reich. Some went willingly, some were forcibly sent there. The bombardment of Munich then started, and they ran away. Then they had to live on the lam here, because there were still policemen patrolling, searching for them, they couldn’t visit their homes, and so they lived in forests. In the forests there were some six bunkers which they used as a cover for cold. They had to survive one winter there. They also went to visit their homes. They were the soldiers from the Obrana národa organization, and they all held together. They were not an organized whole, rather they were friends who held together since the beginning of the war. They simply wanted to fight for freedom. They were in the forests and I knew about them. I was a ten-year-old boy then. I called them uncles, I knew them by their first names. One day Ráček came and told me to bring food for them there. I put it into my rucksack, and went on skis. They had a fire there, I gave the food to them. One of them got up and carried the rucksack away, another gave me bread and a piece of fat and told me to eat. I was so flabbergasted, I only brought them some snacks and they gave me such a nice meal.”