Eduard Šlachta (1924)

"If a single missile is fired, the living will envy the dead..."

“Six people were executed, it was a weird feeling.” “And when was it? And how did you get there?” “There were interrogations, and I sort of shared something with them, and then there were official executions. They were partly public.” “And what year was it?” “It was probably 1947, they caught them after the war.” “And you took part in it? You sat on some interrogation committee?” “Not really a member, but three times I was offered to help to convict… I was interrogated by them, but I was not a ... Most of all, we were happy that the war was over, we danced on Glen Miller, and Armstrong, and music was playing everywhere, and two or three years after… we all rejoiced. You understand, at that time everyone had at least two or three kids, and people lived outside, they did not sit at home with their computers or TV sets. There was Sokol, music choirs, and what not.” “So you helped to convict them, those people on the Gestapo?” “Well, that’s the way it was, I was one of the few who were present there, in fact I did not participate in all that as much as those who were there for a longer time. I was there as a member only, let’s say, just saying: ´Yes, that was him.´ I could have been there longer during all those interrogations. They brought them in. The executioner was from Prostějov, I think, and of course he had a hood over his face. And this Kohoutek, this informer, who had them all drowned, he was an informer through and through and he arrested all. This is all written in books. A his words were: ´Good-bye, my friends,´ and there was a lot of people. And when they brought him in, he had a noose around his neck and the executioner put a hand on his head, so that when the trapdoor was opened, he fell down and died quicker, because the weight of the body and the pushing of the skull aside breaks his neck on impact, the executioner knows the trick. They let him hang for ten minutes, then the doctor lifts him up, there is a coffin under him. And there was another one, a woman, I don’t know her name, she was an informer and the Gestapo arrested her, and she, I don’t remember exactly, but she then served as an informer for them. They told her something to test her, you know, there were no mobile phones then, and she went to a meeting with partisans. The partisans had some hiding place there, from the other side of the Lysá Mountain. And she came there and said these things to them, and they also did not know that they were being arrested, at that time there was no way to find that out. And people did not even know each other, they had no clue. It was not like today, when I just pick up the phone and speak. Like I just spoke with my son, he was in America, and I was sitting in the toilet and speaking with him at the same time. No way. She knew some things, and they trusted her. She was probably instructed so during the interrogations by the Gestapo. And thus they believed her that she was a paratrooper, that she was a Czech, and that she was deployed there from Russia. And she was also executed.”