Karel Dohnal

“When the Germans withdrew, my father informed all to withdraw. He didn’t eat anything since the morning, so he stopped at home. I remember we had smoked meat, dumplings and cabbage. Everything was on the table, and from the window I could see the mountains and the upper bridge. They rode there, the tanks stopped. We hid all the meat away. We went to the cellar, and my father was gone. He had two guns with him, he hid them and ran away. The Germans were already up there on the rock. On the other side of the promontory near Podskalí. From there they could see the entire village of Kněžice, and they began shooting at my father. Dad had met some legionnaires before, and he knew from their experience that if they are shooting at you, you should jump to the place where a bullet went, because the next bullet will not fall in the same place. Dad remembered it and he jumped there in that muddy meadow. He ran away, the Germans didn’t hit him from up there. He ran for the forest and there was a bullet hole in his rubber boot. Near that forest there were a husband and wife living in the very last house in Podskalí, and they saw it. Dad allegedly fell to the ground, then got up and continued running. They came to us and told us that he would probably be lying dead somewhere, that they had seen him fall down. That we should go and look for him. But where were we to go? Mom gathered us and we went to wait in that cellar.”

“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!´”