Ivo Středa

"Although we had a flat in Česká Skalice, in a working class neighbourhood, we used to be in Na Pohodlí very often. I´m not sure, when and which way captain Sokolovskij moved there with the active transmitter...In my memories, it was some time in April. I remember them living in that cottage, Captain with my father in a lively contact, ...as my Dad was a former officer, they might have had quite a lot to talk about. I don´t know what kind of information they were collecting. There was General Schörner in the Lázně Velichovky, the spa, and in the Ratibořice Castle, there was his military police...It might have been somehow in disarray... I remember a young girl, a telegraphist, called Anna Vinogradova, streching a wire in the loft, encrypting and transmitting messages. It might have been in disarray that they didn´t identify us even if the transmitter was active. Because there was yet another back-up one. Once we set out to it by bike, captain Sokolovskij and me, up the Úpa River towards the Havlovice village, and before Havlovice, there is the Šiškovna (cottage/inn). And after that, we kept going somewhere further, towards the Jestřebí hory mountains, the mountain range near Malé Svatoňovice. Where we stopped, I don´t know, but we visited the second, back-up transmitter, operated by a young boy, about one year older than me. I was seventeen or eighteen. And in the Šiškovna, the Captain had Vodka from that old woman who was in charge of it. On our way home, ahead of us, we could see something like a patrol. So, we hit with the bikes on the ground, escaped to the forest and waited for quite a time. But nothing was happening. We took our bikes again then and went back to Pohodlí.

"In Kladno, in June 1939, a German police officer was shot at night, at the fence of a grammar school. A martial law in Kladno was introduced like a shot. I was already twelve then and I can remember that, till next morning, there were sandbacks and machine gun nests at every corner of Kladno. We used to live in a small street in a makeshift flat opposite the bar, where lots of German officers used to go. My father was then in hospital with hernia, the morning events happened, and my mother went to visit him. And I was alone at home. Now we could see all of this. And I knew that my father, as a former officer, had a revolver, caliber nine, in his cupboard. As a boy, I snatched it and put it in the stove. Then I said to myself: ´This is stupid´, so I shoved it under the beam. I didn´t like it. And then I solved it ´brilliantly´. I put it back to the cupboard and ran away from home. I ran into the side street and then I saw in the ground floor windows of low houses one swarm of German soldiers after another breaking into a flat and throwing clothes from wardrobes. And I couldn´t go back. It was done in such an interesting way that you could go somewhere but couldn´t go back. Perhaps it was because Germans used to go to that street, they knew it there. I don´t know what divine providence it was but our street was omitted..."