"When we arrived to England and I saw their incredible tenacity, I knew that Hitler had no chance of winning this war."
Jan Pavlíček was born December 23rd 1917 in Palkovice. His father was an organist, but he worked for the railways. Jan graduated from the grammar school in Ostrava in the Přívoz neighbourhood and went to Prague. In autumn 1939 he took part in student demonstrations there. On November 17th of the same year he experienced the seizing of Czech university dorms by German troops. He managed to escape from the occupied Republic to Hungary, where he was placed in an assembly camp in Budapest. Together with a group of other Czechoslovaks he managed to cross the border to Yugoslavia, from where he travelled via Thesalloniki, Istanbul, and Damascus all the way to Beirut in Lebanon, and from there he was transported to Agde in southern France, where he joined the French Foreign Legion on April 16th 1940. He went through initial training and partial shooting training. He was deployed in the defence of Paris in June 1940. With the army he retreated to the south of France and from there he was evacuated to Liverpool. In England he was trained as a light tank operator. In 1944 he was in the second wave of the invasion to France and he took part in the siege of Dunkerque. After the war he was working in the National Land Registry fund, and later he held a managerial position in the Ostrava mines.
