Josef Polívka

“On Christmas Eve, the regiment cook made us Chrismas dinner. He took a few crackers and tea, added marmalade and the dinner was ready. There was nothing else to eat. They brought 16 or 18 Germans that were to be guarded by our troop before they would transfer them to the rear area. Because the boys who had served in the front area were pretty exhausted – thy didn’d sleep the last couple of nights, had no clothes and had a cold – we, the new-arrivals offered them to take care of the German prisoners. We drew a circle in the sand and the Germans had to remain within that circle. We took the first shift and they were supposed to take the second sometime around one o’clock in the night. Some guys from the second shift then took a couple of watches from the Germans. We saw that the Germans were old warhorses – some lay on the ground, then they stood up and another bunch of them lay down etc. That way they could keep themselves warm, because the night was really cold. In the morning, when an English troop came to take the Germans away, they complained that they had been robbed of their watches. It was a big mess. The watches had to be returned and those who took them even had to apologize to the Germans. The behavior of the English was really gentleman-like. It was forbidden to rob prisoners, and so it was obeyed.”

“When I came home, it was tough for me…it was horrible. My dad weighted only about 50 kilos. It’s still hard to talk about it for me today. My mom and my sister were more or less alright but my dad never really recovered from this. The only thing that helped me a bit was that I could leave, after reaching an agreement with him. Later, when we came to joke about it, we used to say that he was the same weight as a sack of cement. A man like him, who used to have 80 kilos before, had just 50. He never gained his original weight again. He died in 1968 after spending the last year of his life sick. That was one of the things that prompted me to leave the army.”

“In a space where I was disoriented, where you woke up in the morning and got tea that was made in salty water, I got a car that I was unable to start, because the cars there were in a terrible condition. It was a civilian Chevrolet, a pick up, as they say these days. It was about 10.00 o’clock, an Englishman came to me, it was our liaison officer. I wasn’t able to communicate with him. The officer who brought him to me said: ‘It will be all right, he’ll explain you everything’. So he got on the pickup truck, sat next to me in the cabin and we got on the way. He showed me the way – it wasn’t a road, rather a sand path in the desert. I drove very carefully and slowly. There was a cloud of dust rising from behind the car. He told me to go faster. I didn’t understand so he stepped on the gas pedal and we went faster. I was really frightened by it. When we arrived at the Polish brigade command, the Poles told me why he wanted to go faster. It was because some stretches of the way we came were visible to the Germans who held territory bordering on it. They could have shelled us from the hill they held. It was called Meduar and from it they could see the whole Tobruk perimeter all the way to the port.”

“I asked for the reasons, I served four and a half years in the army, in the war, and I didn’t deem it necessary anymore to… The reason was, that they are drawing in specialists trained on tanks, and that tanks are no longer an efficient weapon. The new all-important war instrument was considered to be the air force. So they told us that they would retrain us to be aircraft mechanics. The training took place in Líně. It was a scam. All they wanted was to keep us away from Pilsen, from the workers of the Škoda works that rebelled against the monetary reform that took place two days later. They were afraid that we might join the workers in their revolt. The revolt of the Škoda workers was taking place in Pilsen and we were sitting in Líně with nothing to do, no training had been prepared for us. The Lieutenant who was in charge of us told us quite openly: ‘guys, I have no training prepared for you, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you, come with me, I’ll show you something. Maybe they’ll give me something later on but for now I’ve got nothing. So we were stuck there with nothing to do, no duties. The days after the reform were passing, Saturday, Sunday, the platoon leader who had us assigned, a Slovak, who had been transferred from Budweis to Líně, was that type of a commander who’ll tell you: ‘I can’t read, I can’t write, but I’ll give you a hard time on the drill’. He ordered me to dig a latrine. I was a staff sergeant and rebelled against his order. I said that I’m not gonna dig latrines. We were supposed to be retrained there, so they’ll either train us or we’ll do nothing. In the ends, the others did it in order to get a pass from the garrison.”