Colonel (ret.) Josef Macků

“I would like to tell you that there was also the later general Klapálek among the soldiers who stayed there and who didn’t get to France, he went through several marches when he was trying to escape from the country through Hungary. He came to Palestine and his feet were completely ruined. He found out somehow that I had worked for Baťa and that I could know how to make pedicure. Which was not so… but I had the course. I told him that I had no equipment for that and he obtained that in some Baťa shops and I had to make him a pedicure twice or three times. Once it also happened that when I my platoon was transferred outside Bayreuth, Klapálek’s car came with an order that a certain Macků has to see Klapálek on account of a pedicure.”

“What did those missions look like?” “After dark we set out. We were armed and went up the hills to the Italian frontline. If it was dangerous? We couldn’t get caught. Captivity didn’t exist for us, we knew that we had to end differently than to get captured. Our responsibility was to have a clear view of the Tobruk perimeter because it was the only place that the Germans didn’t siege because they thought that there were strong forces there. So when it was dark we went to the frontline, but then you had to be careful at the daybreak not to be seen in the light. So this is how it was. And that we would fight with a bayonet… it didn’t happen, there wouldn’t be anything left from us.”

“We were five children and there was only one of us who could go to study, I didn’t have any other choice than to go to Baťa where most of the people went. It wasn’t very far, just sixty kilometers from home. In 1938 I was sent to Netherlands for a short trip and after a trial period as an accountant I was supposed to study at the business school and later at the academy. In 1939 I was sent to Borov in Yugoslavia where they should have decided where to place me.”

“As far as I remember, by the time I decided to join the armed forces, I already had my documents ready to be transferred to the Dominican Republic as an accountant. Naturally, I left that aside and I joined the army. In May 1940, we were enrolled at the French consulate in Belgrade, because the Czechoslovak forces were forming in France in Agde. We were warned that after the enrollment to the army we should not walk in the streets too much because there already were German parachute units in Syria and we could be in danger. So we had to escape to Palestine where the English treated us as unknown refugees because the Czechoslovak Republic was not acknowledged. It was called the Assumery, the place where they kept us. They took us to the sea only to have a bath. We didn’t have any right to lead a private life, we were simply refugees. We were supposed to be sailed to France via Greece and Turkey, but Italy had declared war to France and we were stuck in Syria, so out of the thirty men we made a basis of the later Czechoslovak unit, first the 11th Infantry Battalion, then the 200th Anti-aircraft Artillery. That was our rank. We were transferred from the Assumery to an army camp in Gedera, we passed through a heavy training and we were placed into the desert.”