Ing. Josef Skýpala

“What was it like when the Germans were occupying us? It was sleeting, snow and rain… Through Bystřice we could see cars full of soldiers coming from Valašské Meziříčí and heading towards Holešov. The unit made a turn at the square, stopped, and built tents. This was my first impression.”

“The Italian prisoners of war were treated very, very badly. I think they tortured them by hunger. In our factory there was a kitchen, behind it sheds and in them two pigs. One Ukrainian girl brought some remainders from the kitchen to the pigs. As soon as she spilled them down, an Italian man ran in with a metal cup and picked them up. A German soldier showed up, he was about fifty or sixty years old, and begun to beat the crap out of this poor man. We were after a night shift. We jumped out of the window and started to protect the Italian man. The German got lost behind a corner and the Italian was carried away by his friends.”

“Large posters advertising Circus Busch appeared in the city. All right, let’s go there. There were many advertisements and it looked interesting. We could already count the German currency and we could understand. There was a guy in the ticket office. There were three or four of us. Now some woman with a little kid came there, and she was not able to communicate with the cashier. She exclaimed: ´My God, how should I say it so that you would understand me?´ The cashier replied: ´Say it in Czech!´ We were surprised, and we stared at them, because we realized that the girl selling tickets spoke Czech or was a Czech. We felt happy about it. We came inside, and the circus tent was so huge. There were about ten of these… how do you say it? [´Rows, rows of seats.´] Yes, about ten rows. It was in summer and a waiter in white jacket walked between them offering: ´Bier!´ You understand ´ein Bier,´ and have some more… klein… ´Don’t you know the word for beer?´ he asked us. So we drank beer and felt happy. Now imagine, the show started and there was a guy with those red stripes over his belly, and he held three reins in each hand. The horses were wild and restless, and he cursed them in fluent Czech, using swear words! The music began, and do you know what was the first tune they played? Clover growing by the water, the Czech song. The orchestra was playing only Czech hits of that time. I don’t remember them anymore, but the first song was the clover growing by the water. And we could already see that the clowns were not Germans, because they spoke harsh, rough German, but it was not a dialect. I don’t know, but I believe they were Czechs, too. We were happy, or rather surprised about all this. We worked night shift the following day, and so in the afternoon we went to the circus menagerie one more time. There were guys who were hammering pegs to the ground and tightening the canvas and speaking Czech to each other. I asked one of the guys: ´Hey, this is a Czech circus?´ He replied: ´Oh no, but just as you were transported to do conscripted labour in the factory, our transport was sent to the circus, and so we are here.´ I said: ´So everybody in this circus speak Czech, right, and the elephant that you got here is the only one who does not.´ He replied: ´He does not speak, but he understands.´ He called the elephant, and it turned at him and raised his [trunk]. So that was one thing that I like to remember.”

“The daybreak was coming, it was around three o’clock. They arrived from the other side – a young lieutenant around my age; I was twenty-one or twenty. Two soldiers came there. The lieutenant ran over to the one who was sitting or lying on the road, he pulled out a gun and shot him through his head and then he kicked him as the man fell to the ground: ´This is for my mom and for my dad!´ He was a Slovak, and the two soldiers who came with him bent over the corpse. The dead man had nice shoes, and the two soldiers argued over who would have them. We watched in horror as one of them eventually got the shoes. They removed the shoes from the dead man’s feet, but since they were two small, the other soldier got to have them anyway. These soldiers were not equipped properly, and the soldier’s shoes were broken from the front or from the marching. They had no way to get new shoes. As the front moved, some had shoes so bad that their toes were sticking through. There were soldiers like these, too.”

“Now there were three cities which had not been bombed yet: Halle, Dessau, which was close, and Leipzig. There were air raids. Warning alarms were sounded daily. Chemnitz, Dresden and Bresslau – these cities still had not been bombed while we were there. Only later, in 1945, Dresden was destroyed by bombing. And Bresslau got hit, too, when the front passed over it. In Chemnitz, where we were, it happened towards the end, in September or October, I don’t know. There were factories in the suburbs. The suburbs were called Siegmar and Schoenau, but ours was a small factory and we were in the city centre. These suburbs were similar to the Libeň or Kobylisy neighbourhoods in Prague, for example. Out of the city centre, there was a large factory, comparable to the Škoda factory in size, which produced tanks, the Panthers. These were small tanks, but very fast for rapid assaults. They were producing them in thousands. Trains loaded with tanks were leaving the factory at nights. We had anti-aircraft concrete shelters, which had been just recently constructed, and we watched the bombers flying over. An alarm sounded, so we had to go to the shelter, and we watched the aircraft flying over in formation. The bombers flew in rectangular formations six by eight. The accompanying fighter planes just quickly flashed in between them. There were so many bomber planes that you could not count them. Now we could see one formation after another, six bombers in each, flying over and dropping bombs. The shelter began to shake, and so we closed the door and waited for the bombs to hit us. Twelve bombers dropped their bombs there, and a friend of mine and I then went there to have a look. The area was totally devastated. Even stones were on fire. When the incendiary bombs hit the expressway, the concrete slabs over a meter in thickness broke like pieces of chocolate. We saw people looting and taking things from the dead. They were carrying them to the factory yard [´To the yard of that factory, right?´] on stretchers and assembling them in rows. There were around a hundred of them. It was something terrible. My friend told me: ´Look.´ We went there to see if there were any Czechs. There were none among the dead. But there were so many corpses. My friend said:´Hey, there is a hand over there.´ Under a bush there was a nice white female hand. A hand of some girl or woman. I got so sick that I said: ´I don’t want to see anything more, let’s go back.´”

“There was a large Russian garrison in the town and we lived right next to them. It was one year after [the occupation] or so, and I met one woman. She was my wife’s friend; they knew each other from the Baťa factory. She told me: ´May Day is coming, and the Soviet army is going to march in the parade, I plan to go and see it. I am so curious to see them.´ I said to her: ´But people in Frenštát are saying that if the soldiers march, the Frenštát citizens will not join the parade.´ Man, you should have seen how she told me off. She just spit all the swear words she knew on my head. The only thing I said was just this. She kept cursing me and it lasted for quite a while, she criticized me for this and that and what not, and she finished by saying: ´See you in free Czechoslovakia without the Party!´ When this happened, I was there with my daughter who was a schoolgirl, and we just stared at this Mrs. Geprtová and wondered what got hold of her. Later she witnessed against me as a person who allegedly knew our family. She had been my wife’s friend and she made an effort to cause me all this trouble. My wife had nothing, and they sacked her from her job just like me. They claimed that she must be the same as me. She worked in the personal department, in charge of social affairs, and both of us got fired.”