Leopold Fiala

"We spent a lot of time in France. I was with the artillery regiment. When I showed my leave certificate they took me for a soldier. We got to the Agde Czechoslovak military training grounds in southern France where they concentrated fugitives from all over the world. From there, they were sending readymade regiments to the battlefield. So I enrolled for the 1st artillery regiment and was assigned to the 9th battery. I got to the village of Portel. I served pretty long there. We guarded the coast because there was the danger that the Germans would do something out there. France wasn’t occupied yet but we were facing great dangers from every direction.”

“We got out of that railway-station building at Galanta under the pretext that we had to go to the toilet. We wanted to… of course we were looking for a way to escape. It took a long time before someone from the Slovak and Hungarian side made himself heard. No one expected something from the German side, of course. When I saw the field – “turčání” – as they used to call it in Moravia, a kind of a field with gone maize, it wasn’t cut, it was high, just the spike lets were cut. So I told myself that maybe it would after all be possible to get there and hide somewhere out there. So I agreed with another guy where we would go. I said I would run to the right and he said he would run to the left so they wouldn’t catch us both if they went after us. As I got to this “turčání”, closer to the field, I thought that maybe I was going to make it. So I started running, the other guy started as well but to the other side and we managed to run away from the police and out of the railway station. Then the Hungarian policemen were searching for us but didn’t find us. They alerted the frontier guards. All of a sudden these Gestapo men and guard members came and all of them started to shoot at us.”

“We were formed into an independent Czechoslovak tank brigade by the English and put into combat at Dunkerque. That’s where we guarded a fortress. It was very well secured. It was one of the best French military ports with all the guns and cannons and conceivable military equipment. All of this was seized by the Germans and used against the British and the French. We were watching them as far as it was possible, assaulting them, taking captured German POW (prisoners of war) back to our base for interrogation. It was as it is in war. I was wounded at this Dunkerque. I got into an English hospital where I stayed for seven months.”

“We came to Liverpool in England. We disembarked and they wanted to know who we are and what weapons we had. When we left France we weren’t allowed to carry anything with us. But we put the weapons that we had stolen from the French on a pile. It was a whole artillery battery, mortars and all possible things. After we sorted the weaponry and after they counted it, they said we were the best armed unit in England.”