“That was in Kiel. We were about one hundred Czech together, and so we took it better. We were assigned there to put out fires caused by air raids in Kiel and Hamburg.”
“Things were really broken up in Hamburg. The whole city was on fire. We drove a hundred kilometres in the night to help. When we got there, the whole of Hamburg was in flames, and we couldn’t get into the city. We sprayed jets of water from both sides to create a pathway that we could drive along into the city.”
“There was just the occasional air raid, life was quite peaceful there otherwise. The officers who trained us were okay enough. They knew they needed us, so I guess they were nicer to us than they’d normally be. I was just out of secondary school, and as a boy I didn’t know what to expect there, so I wasn’t really afraid. The important thing was that I didn’t go to Germany alone, there was a hundred of us. We were encouraged by the fact that we were together. [Q: Do you see it more as an adventure, or as danger?] More as an adventure. I only saw the danger when I got there, when we arrived in Kiel and they took us from the station to the hotel, where we were accommodated. Right that moment there happened to be planes over Kiel, and they shot at them from the ground. Parts of the rounds fell down on us, and we thought they were shooting at us. That was nasty, but then we got used to it and we weren’t afraid any more.”
Jiří Havlík was born in 1923 into the family of a teacher in Štěchovice, where he grew up together with his six years younger sister. He was eleven when his mother died and his father married his sister-in-law. After graduating from secondary school in Prague, the witness was one of hundreds of other boys born in 1923 who were assigned to forced labour in the German Reich. He served in an emergency fire brigade in the north German port of Kiel; his task was to stop fires caused by bombing runs. The brigade also helped extinguish fires in Hamburg, a hundred kilometres away. While doing forced labour he made friends with Antonín Tejnor, a young poet who later became a linguist. The boys returned home after a year. After the war Jiří Havlík earned a degree in geodesy and started a family.
