Vítězslav Keller

“It wasn’t quite as drastic in Dobřany as in some other places in the border regions, where there was shooting and all kinds of excesses, but you could tell something was going on. It was almost comical because those young Nazis used to meet up in Ševt’s pub, which was by the train station, and they’d get a bit tipsy there, of course, so they’d light torches and march willy nilly through the town, just calling out things, perhaps some minor clashes, but they didn’t dare do much more because there was half a regiment of dragoons stationed there; one half was in Klatovy and the other was in Dobřany, so they were also afraid of the soldiers’ intervention.”

“We had an ugly experience on Monday the 7th, when an SS troop marched through the village with four hay carts in tow, which were driven by farmers from Olešná near Hořovice, which they had requisitioned because they had run out of petrol, so they loaded all the heavy weapons, rations, and ammunition up on to the hay carts and took them with them. They passed through the village, and that was a bad feeling. Then by the forest, about a kilometre and a half away, they equipped themselves and released the farmers. The farmers were completely shocked because it often happened that they would shoot [the helpers] instead of releasing them. And a kind of rare occurence was that many many years later I met one of those farmers from Olešná near Hořovice. So we reminisced. The Germans were in quite a fighting mood, so they started digging trenches and laying mines on the road. Well, and then suddenly a light-armoured recon car drove up, so there was a bit of a firefight. And it drove off again. And then tanks started coming out of the forest. A forester had taken them there and led them through the forest. So [the Germans] definitively surrendered then. As an added bonus, there was one German tank that just drove up and stopped on the crossroads and still had a kind of fighting spirit. So then when the SS surrendered, my father persuaded them into giving up too, so they dropped their weapons, and then the Americans captured them.”

“Some people didn’t listen, they didn’t want to hide in the shelters at all. One of them was our housekeeper, Mrs Šlajzová. She didn’t go at all. Until suddenly there was one air raid in autumn 1944. And really were bombs falling down nearby for the first time. She was inside her flat on the ground floor of the house, terrified. And could tell because she was chewing that digusting Protectorate salami, which she spat out in her fright and threw into the stove, and she threw it in complete with her dentures. Just the fact that she had a fire lit was against the ban, because from experience in Germany it was banned to have an open fire during an air raid because when the bombing started, if the fireplace got broken, the bomb was basically augmented inside the house because the flammable objects caught fire and started burning.”

“Those weren’t just any kind of soldier. One of them, he was in the reserves, and he was called up to serve as an officer. And he did and was released again. He had a little factory where he made potato harvesters even in the wartime. That was a kind of rarity. The second uncle, Vojtěch Švantner, he was a munitions specialist, and he fled to Slovakia and taught their munitions experts there until the end of the war, and then he stayed there and didn’t return until he was pensioned sometime in the seventies. And the the third uncle had the worst fate of all. That was my uncle Pepa Kraus. Back then he was a Lieutenant Colonel of the General Staff in charge of artillery. Among other things, he was in touch with the Russians, whom we supplied big guns, blueprints, and production machines to, but at a certain moment during the purges in the Red Army, things got stuck. Well, and this uncle joined the resistance, but they were soon found out or betrayed, and in 1941 he was executed in Dresden.”