Colonel Čestmír Smolka

“My brother worked in the home resistance, and our house served as a munitions depot for the units. Both for the brigade and for others. Our house stored weapons designated for combat. And when my brother was preparing to blow up some train, he did that at home together with two or three other people, and as he was preparing it, by a stroke of bad luck he dropped the grenade, and all the ammunition and all the things we had stored there for the Jan Žižka brigade, it exploded. Everyone there was killed. My sister, brother, mother, and three other people died there. There was room upstairs, a lady lived there with one man, a married couple in fact. The Homers. She was there in the broken house, when it blew up; and Mr Homer, he was employed at the railway in Krásná. And when he came home, he saw the house was destroyed, he saw the way things were, so he turned to leg it, and the Germans shot him. They took him to Valašské Meziříčí, threw him out by a fence somewhere, and come morning he was dead.”

“We were in Zlín. Or Vsetín, I can’t remember. We set off through a forest; we were nearing a road when some Germans drove by in a truck. We met them all of a sudden. Suddenly, us and them. Well, so we started shooting, they jumped off their cars and returned fire. Well, we started to run and they followed suit. There weren’t any dead on our side, I don’t know about them, because we legged it. We didn’t wait for them to get more help or something of the like. We clashed on the road, that’s it. We were on our way on some mission, and they drove up by car. By truck. I don’t know where they were headed or what, they just drove up. We knew they were Germans, so we started shooting. There were lots of firefights like that. You’d come upon someone all the time. Even traitors, when they were Czechoslovaks. Many firefights... but not organised or something. They were random, we didn’t do prepared shoot-outs. All the shooting was by chance. We saw some Germans, we saw, I don’t know, some SS men or the like, so we started shooting at them. Without any prior preparation.”