Otakar Riegel

“I experienced the last attack, or counterattack, between April 10 and 15, 1945. The Germans broke through a part of the western perimetre of the front. The troop commander, staff captain Šik, selected three tanks from the individual columns to go to support the first tank battalion. My tank was among them and we set out. Commander Podlesný was in the first tank. Mine was the second, and a colleague of mine was driving the third one. We rode at night, and unfortunately, as we were approaching the enemy positions, Podlesný ran over an enemy mine. The tank caught fire, which we put out quickly with fire extinguishers. Podlesný however was severely wounded. The shot-firer was dead, radio operator survived, the turret shooter was dead, and the driver was dead as well.”

“I want to tell you that the Poles were not good people. For instance, policemen rode into the church building of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church on horses, they chased out the believers, the clergyman had to move out of his house and the church remained closed all that time. They did not acknowledge other churches. Just the Roman Catholic ones. They closed the Czech schools. They immediately began teaching in Polish there. That’s what it came to.”

“A jeep arrived after an hour or so and took me to the camp, which was on the shore, surrounded by barb wire, by so-called Spanish wires. According to my estimate there were some one thousand and two hundred prisoners. We spent the night there and at night about eight German Stuka planes arrived and began bombing the area around the camp. The captives were pushing through the barb wire trying to get out. Some managed to get out. Some were trying to scratch that Normandy soil and dig a hole so that they could bury their noses at least. You could see that they were already nerve wrecked from the preceding events which had happened during the invasion.”

“The training! You cannot imagine how hard it was. We were tired, and we had to keep everything clean. It was covered with mud. It was wet, but it had to be clean. Boots, and all that, and quickly. I had a disadvantage because they knew that I was a Czech. I didn’t speak German perfectly at that time. We would come back and they would always pull out planks from my bed and use them to make fire. Because we were getting only thirty briquettes of coal and it was cold in these wooden barracks, and everyone had just one blanket. We were shaking, it was so cold. Whenever I returned from the training, the officer would shout: ´Dienst!´ Duty! He came over, saw, that my things were not in order, and he threw them on the floor. I had it messed up every day. This Munsterlager was near Hannover, and even if they were not bombing us, there were planes flying over it. ´Fliegeralarm!´ Helmet, blanket, rifle, and jump into the trench! I slept for three nights during those five months of the training. The Englishmen and Americans were flying every day.”

“The second attack was not that successful and we stood in front of a house and a machine-gun was shooting at us from a distance of about eight hundred metres…”

“This tiny Russian Nikolaj had only one meter sixty. He had built a small bunker, just for himself. On the top it was covered with dirt, and there was a narrow entrance just for him on the side. When we were in a hurry I didn’t run into our bunker, but I hid in this Russian’s bunker. A bomb was whistling, and there was a blast. It covered our entrance and we began suffocating. There was no oxygen, only carbon dioxide. We were wet, we began parting with our lives, and this little Russian was crying. He spoke bad German, he was saying: ´Wir müssen sterben.´ We have to die. But he managed to reach with his hand into his pocket, and get out a pocket knife. With the unopened knife he was scratching around, just by feeling, because we couldn’t see anything. He felt the door and it was possible to make an opening there. I was then removing the dirt with my two fingers, and then he managed to open his knife with one hand. He made a hole with the blade. It was the size of a ten-crown coin. The light was coming in through that small hole. But we could still smell the smoke of exploding bombs. The bombing was still going on. It was something terrible to wait out what happened next. When the bombing ceased, after many hours, he began cutting a hole. I could move my hand a little bit more, and remove the dirt. When he made the hole big enough, he got out, but I was not able to get through. He got out and said he would bring a shovel from the rocket launcher and make a larger hole for me. He did it. I told him: ´Nikolaj, do you want to go with me?´ He said he did. And so we went to the Englishmen. But that time before the bombing ended... you didn’t know what would follow, because the bombs were exploding right next to you. You could hear the whistling sound. One falling, then a second, third, fifth, tenth, hundredth, I though that was the end of the world, there was no end to it. And they were also shooting from the sea, from twenty-eights and thirty-twos. The Englishmen were bombing from ships. I thought: I don’t want to become a cripple. Let the bomb hit me, but I don’t want to be a burden to anybody.”