“There were 702 people killed and there were Germans among them as well, and houses were destroyed and the air raid lasted from eleven until twelve o’clock and I survived it in front of the grammar school; they just dug a hole and if a bomb had exploded somewhere there, all the children would have died there. I was only eleven years old at that time.”
“It was forbidden to listen to radio broadcast from London. There was a small card with a sign: Remember that listening to a foreign broadcast is punished by imprisonment or even death. Obviously, all people had the ‘Churchill device,’ it was an extra apparatus that was inserted inside the radio and the short wave broadcast could then be received. This device was named after Winston Churchill and it was possible to receive short wave radio broadcast. At first you needed to put it inside and then you took it out; those were horrible times.”
“I was returning from a May worship service and it was announced that an attack on Heydrich had been done today and that whoever would assist the perpetrators would be executed together with his family. My father was a legionnaire and he feared that the Gestapo would come to arrest him, but fortunately it did not happen.”
Ladislav Procházka was born October 9, 1933 in Bratislava. He came from a Czech family. His father was a former Russian legionnaire and he worked for the police in Slovakia. After the establishment of the Slovak state in 1939, the family had to move back to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Ladislav studied grammar school after the war and he applied to study at an air force academy. He served in Slovakia as well as in Bohemia, but after 500 flight hours in the 28thth regiment he was dismissed from the army for political reasons without any eligibility for a pension. He had difficulties finding a job after his dismissal and he worked as a miner and in the construction company Montované stavby in Brno. He was rehabilitated in the 1990s and promoted to the colonel‘s rank. Ladislav Procházka is deeply interested in military history and he has a great passion for music.
