“I was on my way to school as usual, there was no warning. They came without notice, the radio gave no such information. I was riding my bike in our old way on the left-hand side [of the road]. I met the Germans halfway between Rokycany and Borek, at the place where the memorial of the demarcation line meeting now stands. The weather was nasty, it was snowing, there’d been a snowfall of at least ten centimetres. It was a surprise. I had to dodge out of the way and then push the bike all the way to Rokycany. There were columns of them coming the opposite direction.”
“We were forced to farm. That means we had to hire people for work. We had cattle. Mum couldn’t work, we wanted to get rid of it, so we offered it to the national committee. At the time they told us: ‘Let them choke on it.’ The Communists said: ‘Let them croak.’ They didn’t want to take over the farming, the farm work. Not until after a long long time, when they confiscated our cattle, so we didn’t have to worry about it any more.” [Note: The Kofroňs were in a situation where they could not rent their farm as they did during the war. The fields and pond belonging to the family had already been nationalised. Miloslav Kofroň, employed full-time at the Rokycany pharmacy, and his ageing parents were thus left with cattle without any means of supporting them.”
“I then decided that I had had enough and that I would flee. I told this to the apothecary. At three in the night I got ready and took the S-Bahn to Berlin. Travelling by train was limited, only some people were allowed to enter the train station. What did I do? I took two eggs, stuffed them into the hands of the porter, and got myself onto the station. I took a normal local train, which was crammed with people fleeing towards Dresden, Prague. I took the train to Dresden, it didn’t go any further. I walked up and down the station, trying to work out what next. I happened to notice a passenger train going in the direction of Vienna. I wanted to board it, but it was a fully occupied military train packed with soldiers. I begged them to take me inside, but they didn’t let me into the carriage. So I decided: ‘Hey, make use of the fact you’re young, you can do it.’ So I climbed on to the train and rode the buffer all the way to our borders, to the borders of the Protectorate. That was on 16 April. And I had this intuition that on 16 April the Russians launched their offensive on the Oder. The sky was red. I rode on and on...”
Miloslav Kofroň was born on 31 December 1920 in Borek near Rokycany. His father František worked himself up to the position of headmaster of the primary school in Rokycany. Until 1926 his mother Růžena, née Ehrlerová, managed a hammer mill, which she had inherited from her father, and an expansive family farm. Miloslav Kofroň participated in the 10th All-Sokol Rally in Prague in 1938 as a young trainee. He finished grammar school in 1939 and began working as an apprentice at the pharmacy U Bílého čápa in Rokycany. In summer 1944 he was summoned to forced labour in Germany. He received a place card for the pharmacy of Magister Heider Henig in Karow on the outskirts of Berlin. On 16 April 1945 he escaped home from Berlin by train through Dresden. He experienced the end of the war and liberation by the American army in Rokycany. After the war he began a shortened university course and received the degree of PhMr. He spent his six month of military service with the medical section at Střešovice Hospital. On 31 August 1946 he was released from military duty, and that same day he married Božena Bejvlová. He participated in the 11th All-Sokol Rally in Prague in 1948. His family‘s property was confiscated by the Communist regime. Miloslav Kofroň alternately managed the first or the second of the two pharmacies in Rokycany. He lived sixty-five years of married life with his wife, and together they brought up a daughter and a son. Miloslav Kofroň died on May 7, 2020.
