„No a potom vznikl KRAB, ten založil Břéťa Kramářů, to byl učitel na pokračovací škole hned vedle pasáže. A jeho ředitel byl kamaráda, tak nám dovolil zkoušet v tělocvičně. Tak jsme tam zkoušeli, seděli na žíněnkách a hráli. Když to potom šlo, hráli jsme tiskáče, a když nám šly, tak Břéťa Kramářů se znal s Vlachem, jel do Prahy a dovezl originál partitury od Vlacha. Partitury. A to jsme každý dostal jednu skladbu nebo dvě skladby a museli jsme to rozepsat na jednotlivé štymy. To dalo hroznou práci. To byla samá transpozice. A pak se dělaly zkoušky hlasů jednotlivých nástrojů a pak se to dávalo dohromady. A bylo to jak jeden, to bylo výborný. Měli jsme trumpěťáka, který byl jako profík, měli jsme altistu, který byl jako profík, bubeník byl profík a přitom to byli amatéři, ale měli profi vědomosti a znalosti.“
„Na jedné se všechno odevzdávalo, na druhé jste se museli svlékat do naha, na třetí vás oholili, kdekoliv jste měli chlupy, oholili, ostříhali dohola. Ve čtvrté byla velká káď s nějakým hajzlem, tam jste musela skočit a ponořit se i s hlavou, tam byla nějaká dezinfekce. A mokrý jste stál, než to na vás v tom mrazu uschlo. Pak jste dostal plátěný spodky po nějakém nebožtíkovi, košili a kabátek a kalhoty. A zase jste stál v tom průvanu v chodbě, až když byl ten celý transport vybavený, tak teprve jste mohl jít štrůdlem.“
“There was a massive rock jutting out there and next to it a swamp. The whole of the rock was mined out. We went at it from the left side, the other part of the camp went from the other side. We did everything by hand. Chisels, crowbars, hammers, mauls, pitchforks, spades, and we carried everything by hand. Sometimes we managed to break it up into smaller bits. When that didn’t work, you had a shaft up your back because you couldn’t carry it. You had an SS man yelling at you, beating you with a cudgel. So perhaps I’ve got my stiff back from all that. We carried it across the road to the part where the swamp was being filled up because there was to be a youth camp there - a Hitlerjugend camp.”
“At first they put us in a room with eight or ten of us together. There was nothing there, not even a blanket. We slept on the bare ground in the clothes we had on us. All I know is that we were completely louse-ridden. Except the body lice didn’t bite me. From there we were taken to be interrogated by the Gestapo. The interrogations were a simple matter. ‘Did you do it?’ I said I didn’t, and bam, I went flying. So I did that three times, and then I nodded to it and that was that. Then they put us into the remand prison, into a very small cell with plank beds, where there were eight of us. When one turned, the rest had to turn as well because we had to lie on our sides to fit. Again with only what we had on us. There can be no talk of food. You got some vegetable broth and a small, thin slice of bread. Like what field bread was. Dry, nothing to go with it. Or just some black coffee without the so-called soup.”
“We didn’t have a chance. We avoided going into town because they had their marches out there all the time, what with their standards and all. They said it was Turnerverein, a sports association, but in actual fact it was Hitler’s Youth. If you were on the pavement when they marched by in their parade with their banners, they had their select bruisers who went along the pavements and knocked off everyone’s hat. They slapped you and knocked your hat off. You had to show them respect. We Czechs were in highest spirits when the first mobilisation took place and they drafted the chaps from Moravian Slovakia. The beefy types you get in that region. And, the Ordners [Ordnersgruppe, a Sudeten German paramilitary organisation - trans.] started provoking. They wore white long-socks. A group of three blokes went along, and when they saw that, they grabbed one of them, turned him upside down, and cut his socks up with a bayonet. Except, the next day, they were banned from leaving the barracks. The Czech police was not allowed to do anything, those were the orders; we weren’t allowed to provoke, but they could do anything they wanted to.”
“I went to the toilet in the morning, and there were two, three, four dead men there. They were sitting on their spot, and they’d bled to death through their anus. When there wasn’t any food, people drank water, and the water there had an awful amount of lead in it. It contained way too much lead, and that caused the bleeding. I didn’t know what to do, but I had to drink water. I had to go about it with a strong will. The first day I had one gulp, the second day I had two, the third day three, and when that didn’t do anything to me, the fourth day I had a proper drink and at least postponed my hunger by thirst.”
“They had a so-called krankenrevier - a sickbay - in the camp, and in it there was a so-called splittergraben. That was a trench covered by boards and sand. Inside the trench there were these long benches, and they’d sit on those during air raids. When a bomb fell somewhere nearby, the sand would sift down on us. Unfortunately, I have that connected with a sad memory. I had a friend from Bochoř, who slept on the same bed as I did. He slept on the bottom bunk, I slept on top. He fell ill, and he was in the krankenlagr, and when the sirens started blaring, we all rushed off into the shelter, into those splittergrabens. The shelter was only effective against shrapnel. He came with us, and the he said: ‘Damn, I have to go into the bunker that’s assigned to the krankenrevier.’ So he went there, and the bunker got a direct hit, so there was nothing left of him. A few days later I found a finger at the toilets. I recognised it was his because the finger had a ring on it that I had ground out for him from a ten-pfennig coin.”
Vladimír Hamal was born on the 14th of January, 1924, in Olomouc to a family of mixed nationalities. His father was Czech and his mother was German. Vladimír spent his childhood in the border town of Šumperk. He attended a Czech grammar school, and he witnessed the German inhabitants attacking the Czech minority. In early October, shortly before the town was occupied by the Wehrmacht, the family fled Šumperk and moved to Přerov, where Vladimír Hamal completed grammar school. On his nineteenth birthday, he was assigned to forced labour in Berlin, working as a grinder at the AEG factory. He sabotaged the production, and because he was in danger of being discovered, he attempted to escape home in February of 1944. He was soon to be arrested on a train, and after spending a month and a half in a prison in Görlitz, he was taken to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. He will never forget the seven months he spent there. Everyday he witnessed horrifying scenes of death and suffering, personally experiencing how far human hatred can go. Towards the end of 1944, he was requested by the management of the AEG factory in Berlin to return, because by that time they were already struggling with a catastrophic lack of qualified workers. He experienced several Allied bombing runs on Berlin, one of which caused the death of his good friend Bohumil Hraboň. All that Vladimír Hamal found of his friend was a finger with a ring that Vladimír himself had made out of a ten-pfennig coin for Hraboň. In February 1945, Hamal was transferred to a subsidiary plant in Brno. Vladimír was to be sent home after contracting periostitis. He did not miss the Přerov uprising, and saw with his own eyes how they took twenty-one resistance fighters out of the town to their execution in Olomouc-Lazce. After the War, he started studying at the Technical University of Dr E. Beneš in Brno, but then he refused to sign a membership application to the Communist Party, and so he was expelled from school in his seventh semester, postponing his Engineering degree until after the fall of Communism. He died in Přerov on June 5, 2022.
