Boleslav Janků

“We received the questionnaire, as if we wanted to opt for the protectorate. And my father was saying, ‘I am not going anywhere.’ One was not sure what would happen in this protectorate. There was nowhere to go. They moved one out and afterwards didn’t care about you. My father perhaps didn’t know what to do. He kept saying, ‘I am not going anywhere.’"

"Well, when it finished I stayed there alone. I was the last one. I am not showing off here. The last one to leave the site. And I had to leave Sula behind. He was wounded, somewhere in this area. And he kept saying, ‘If it just wouldn’t hurt!’ But he was a heavy bloke and I could not drag him away. And besides that, two Germans were still firing at us. We were hidden in a ditch and could not stand up. Just for your interest - how we checked, we put a hat on the barrel of the gun and suddenly a bang. It was shot through. It was a neighbour. I said, ‘Peter, I can’t carry you. I can’t pull you away.’ I said, ‘Look at the hat.’ He saw that, I could not take him with me. They would shoot him. I said, ‘Peter, I have to go. I am sorry but I have to leave you here.’”

“And now they say they don’t want to stay with us. They want to go, to meet the approaching army, they say. I think we made a mistake there and as we were inexperienced, we didn’t know. We wanted to help them, so we gave them a revolver and a map, and we marked on the map where we were. Just with a dot. If they made it to the Russian army, they could get us some arms dropped from a plane, as we didn’t have any. I personally only had a six-shot pistol and just one magazine in it. It was meant for my personal security. In case I ever encountered... but we didn’t have any weapons. And after a fortnight the Russians went away, our guys saw them off right to Litovel, to the border. They told them there, ‘Pass through here and you are on the other side.’ Yes, the border was guarded but it didn’t take a long time and a plane started to fly in circles above our forest. The Germans must have photographed every movement, and after fourteen days they had found us.”

“...and one of the Germans was hiding in the car and kept firing. He fired the whole time. Although, I fired back at the car, I could not see him, so I kept changing direction. There ... there... I kept trying but every time, after a little while, “bang”! To get out was quite impossible. And there was another one firing and I could not figure out where from. He laid covered behind the road, in a ditch. It was maybe 100 metres away but I did not know where exactly. Until, all of a sudden, I realised. So I set the sight. I fired at him too but nothing happened. I set the sight the wrong way perhaps. So I set it for him for 100 metres. I aimed, bang, the bloke was gone. I say: ‘So, I got one. But how about the other one? He doesn’t move at all!’”

“Well this way we actually got to the Crhov partisans and after that, we went to different places everyday. The Germans were always one step behind us. They could see where we stopped during the day. They would say, ‘We will catch you at night’. When they arrived, we had already left, we were in a different place by then. Everyday we moved somewhere else and slept in fields, in bushes, without blankets, without cover. Nothing. Because everything was left behind in those bunkers.”