“The Germans were well motorised back then, and they drove around in trucks. So we gesticulated at them. As boys, we had what was called ‘gumshots’, slingshots, which we loaded with stones. It had quite a range, and we often shot at the Germans on their cars. I guess we even hit someone, because they stopped as well. But we always legged it. They never shot at us. It was pretty audacious, and our parents didn’t like hearing about it.”
“For instance, I had to go with some message to [Horní] Studénky or here in Bušín or in Písařov. Always in the dark of night, of course, and I was a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy. But the Písařov group never let me go home by myself. They always gave me two or three armed escorts. I was always frightened of what would happen if we met any gendarmes. But it never did. The gendarmes were mostly older blokes, and they avoided the dark and weren’t active.”
“We were planting potatoes in the field. It was early spring. Dad had borrowed a horse and stayed on the field, and Mum and I rode home on the horse. When we arrived, we suddenly saw Karel Cikryt dash out from the Cikryts’ place and run up along the path, with three blokes some fifty, seventy metres behind him, yelling: ‘Halt! Hände hoch!’, as in, hands up. And Karel rushed up to the path there, turned towards them and shouted: ‘Kiss my ass!’ We had to stop because they were shooting at him across the road. But none of them hit him, and he soon disappeared into the forest.”
Konstantin Karger was born on 8 December 1929 in Bušín near Šumperk. In 1944, at the age of fourteen, he acted as a messenger between resistance and partisan groups around his native village. During a massive operation against resistance fighters in the area, he would set out under the cover of night on a perilous journey though the forest to pass on important information. He received most of his messages from his uncle Jan Karger. The latter built a secret shelter in his house in Olšany for his sons Alois and Jan and the Soviet fugitive Alexei Poleshikov, members of an Olšany partisan group who were wanted by the Gestapo after participating in several acts of sabotage. After the war Konstantin Karger trained as a blacksmith; after completing compulsory military service, he worked at the Olšany paper works until his retirement. In 1957 he married Marie Divišová; they had three sons and two daughters. As of 2017, he lives in Bušín, as he did his whole life. He died on August 2024.
