Miroslav Král

“I was on duty and I saw two officers walking. They had these bags. So I greeted them and then I realized they had officers caps but British, not ours. Then I saw them walking along the… and someone must had warmed up two mosquitos for them. The engine had to have optimum temperature. And then they took off. Soon after, military intelligence arrived. They blamed me for not doing anything and not asking them. I told them I was charged to be in the hangar, not to keep an eye on someone. I said they had flown to happiness. They asked: ‘What did you just say, comrade sergeant?’ I repeated that they had flown away to happiness. And in that moment my time with the air force was over. I was not allowed to the hangar anymore and soon I received an order to report to military headquarters in Dejvice, where I was then discharged and returned to civilian life.”

“There were national socialists, but talk about pot calling the kettle back, and against them were the communists. This was because of the influence of Russians here. We had been under their rule since the very first moment. But people had no idea. They waved at them. They came here, and you can see that on the footage from Wenceslas square, the woman running to them and throwing them flowers. At that point people didn’t know yet what it was. It was all secret. Even after the revolution in 1948 it was kept secret. The whole truth about Stalin and what that bunch of his minions really was, what kind of people they were. Those who had fought in the East later revealed that during an attack, for example, those with purple peaked caps walked behind the soldiers and whenever a soldier turned around and wanted to back out, those NKVD men shot him. They maintained discipline this was, which was not common in any other army, to shoot your own people who realized it was crazy to go against a machine gun when they saw how massive the enemy’s superiority was. When they wanted to hide, those guys prevented it.”

“Seventy-five years after the war people have finally started talking about the fact that the Russians didn’t liberate Prague, since they had nothing to liberate. They only arrived on the 9th of May, whereas all the Germans who could had already turned tail and flew to the Western sector through Ruzyně. The fanatics that stayed here, they were only few. Of course, they did some damage but there was no combat activity on the Russian part. They arrived here and had nothing to liberate, given that we had already been liberated.” – “And do you remember the Vlasov army?” – “They came from Smíchov. They were not in this part of the city at all, as far as I remember. They were on the other side of the bank – in Smíchov. That’s where they were. Then they withdrew back to the Ruzyně airport and then naively went into captivity because they figured there was nothing good for them in store with the Russians.”

“We went to the station in Vysočany with the boys. The whole train was there, a transport of so-called national guests. They were accompanied by four or five SS men. The engine driver and the fireman had arrived at the Vysočany station and then ran away. The national guests, they were people running away from bolsheviks, from the Russians. They were mostly older people and women with children, as all the promising men were at the frontline. There was an excitement targeted against them. Sadly, our people… I never took part in it. The boys and I went to the train and opened one car and in it was on grandpa hiding by the hangers and another one on the other side… They were afraid of what would happen to them. We are experts in this area – there’s minimum tolerance and most of the time, as I recall, there are these ‘heroes’ who had tried hard to have as much as possible during the war and then after the war, after the revolution, they reached for a gun.”