Jiří Kašlík

"That night was already terrible, because on 20 August, when we went to bed for our bedtime, they woke us up at 11 o'clock at night, telling us that we had been attacked by the Russians, that we had to go and defend ourselves. Those of us who had submachine guns outside of guard duty only had blanks, we were shooting blanks on the training range. Of course, we learned to shoot with live ammunition, but we had to go to the shooting range. And on the training range, that was two big hills like that, we learned to dig and such stuff, but we had those blanks when we were shooting. They sent us to the armory that night and we were packing live ammunition into the machine guns, into the magazines. Two live magazines and now we had to line up on that 'meeting place', at that battalion, actually it was a bigger battalion. We stood there from midnight to one o'clock and the commanders still didn't know what was going on. Of course, we were ready to defend ourselves, because the battalion commander said, 'We're going to defend ourselves.' It was getting light around three-thirty and we were still standing there, not knowing what was going to happen. Suddenly we heard this noise from afar, and the tanks were coming. They were already there at four o'clock in the morning, at the west line. Well, now we saw, as it got a little bit lighter, that the tanks came up the two hills, there were about six of them. They lined up and pointed down at the barracks with those barrels and stopped and waited to see what would happen. And now all of a sudden, a jeep with a commander came down the tarmac road. He drove up to that battalion, met our battalion commander, and he said we must surrender then, that this was bullshit, that they were going to liberate us from what was going on here. The battalion commander, because he had forced us to defend ourselves and get live ammo, then he had to order us to disarm again, return it to the warehouse and something. That discussion went on until maybe five, six in the morning. Then we just saw something really wild going on, then we heard a shot and the battalion commander shot himself."

"Actually, they didn't have money because of the increased meat, milk and grain obligatory deliveries. They didn't meet them and had to pay fines. They didn't have the money to pay the fines because then somehow they miscalculated the money. They then somehow worked on their own, they could hardly make ends meet. Because most of the farmers had already entered, only a few were resisting, so they increased the deliveries, increased the deliveries, and for not paying the fines my father had to go to prison. So they gave him a month first, I don't know where it was. Then I remember that he got two and a half months (of prison) for a fine that he hadn't paid because of the non-deliveries, and he was sentenced to the prison in Předmostí near Přerov. I remember that my mother took us there, I was three years old and my brother was five. I remember that visit, that they were building a bricks factory there and we were able to come to the fence."