Richard Vyškovský

“At home where I lived, at my aunt’s, there also lived one Mr Runt and Mrs Ankica Runtová, those were Sokol members, trainers, and Mrs Ankica Runtová was the author - and now I’m not sure if it was the last pre-war or the first post-war Sokol rally - she was the author of the women’s routine. And when the Prague Uprising happened here, understandably, he was in the Tyrš [Tyrš House - trans.], he went down to the Tyrš, and when he came back, he said: ‘Richard, come with me so you do something for you country as well.’ So I went with him, my uncle let me, and I was in the Tyrš, and from there they took me to the Small Side Assembly House, where they shoved a gun into my hands. I think it wasn’t loaded, I wouldn’t have been able to shoot with it anyway. And there were captured Germans there. They said: ‘You’ll be guarding these Germans.’ There were more of us there. I remember I hung the rifle so that the barrel faced downwards, I had the strap on my shoulder, and one of our officers saw me there. I don’t know if he was a former officer who’d put on his uniform, or if he was from the Protectorate army. Simply, he was an officer, he had two stars, a lieutenant I guess. And when he saw me, he gave me a proper dressing-down. He said: ‘Are you a gamekeeper, or are you a soldier? At least act like a soldier! And hold that rifle properly!’”

“I arrived in Soběslav, where they have a little church of St Vitus, just a little church that opens just once on Sunday, but there was a sign there saying who to contact to get inside. So I did that, [he] let me inside and said: ‘I’ll come back in half an hour.’ He locked me in the church, and I sat there and gazed. It was unbelievable, I can still imagine it all over again when I remember it. It’s a hall church, which means that it has pillars and no aisles. So there was a row of thin columns before me, the columns were perhaps this diametre - thin, tall columns that reach up to the vault, the ribbed vault. At the end of the victory arch it changed into an irregular vault. The ribs stretched out from the brackets, and the brackets had human heads on them. And there I sat, a young boy, staring at everything, having it all come down on me, and I thought: ‘This is so beautiful, this is what I want to do.’”

“I was taken charge of by a pretty young bloke, in civvies, he always called for me, and so they pulled me out of the cell, put a blindfold over my eyes, and were always happy to let me step out onto where the stairs were, so I’d fall downwards and then they’d jerk me back up again. Then they sat me down in the corner, where there was a wall and a pillar. And there was a couch here, and when I was unpleasant or naughty, I got a slap on the fact and hit my head against the pillar. The bloke sat down, pulled open the drawers in his desk, put his feet up on them, and called for a coffee and sandwiches for himself. And that’s how he talked with me. When I angered him, I got a few smacks in the face, and he’d tell me it wasn’t his mistake but mine for being cheeky to him, so that’s why he couldn’t control himself. And that he didn’t do things like that otherwise because he was a terribly good person.”

“Nowadays Austrians say they were occupied, and that they were later liberated; I know that isn’t true because I witnessed it happen. The streets were stuffed with people who no one forced to be there and who roared in unison: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.’ And opposite our shop, across the street on the other side, there was a shoe shop, which was owned by a Jewish businessman. And I remember how he had to, how they forced him... for one, there was Jude written everywhere, in white on all the shop windows, and he had to scrub the pavement in front of his shop. Those weren’t cops standing there overseeing it, those were local people. So the Austrians really were thrilled by Hitler back then. That was no liberation, that was the same defeat for them as it was for the Germans.”