"Finally, the year 1948 came, so they fired us, arrested us, the families were evicted from their flats. I was fired, I say that then we got five-star hotels - Domeček, Pankrác, Bory. And I was in Bory with General Pika arrested in that department, it was a separate department called the Kreml. No other warder was allowed to talk to us there. Pika was executed there in Bory, his wife was evicted from the apartment, and yet it was not a military apartment. I had the prosecutor, whom Pika had too - he was such a vulgar guy, I can't understand that they could not convict him there. I was sentenced to five years and then I had to go to a labor camp, but I say that in parliament. We are still arguing about this now - that is why rehabilitation was in the nineties. Because I was in the Central Rehabilitation Commission at the Department of Defense. They counted us as if I had been serving since 1948, and I would have physically retired in 1973 or 1974. We were not entitled to severance pay, but those who fired us, when they left then, they received money."
"In the spring of 1944, we went to Russia, and then we were retrained for Soviet airplanes, and there was a commander, the Russian, who said 'eto zakon' almost after every word, so we called him: Etozakon. As we all already flew a lot of hours, one did a practice circuit and said, 'Come on.' So, it was quite quick there and then we kept buzzing that we wanted to line up. So, a delegation led by Fierlinger, Nejedlý etc. arrived there. Nejedlý told us, 'But boys, don't rush anywhere, we'll still need you.' He thought he would train us like that for those who come from England. But it didn't work out. And then we were moved to the Slovak uprising - September 17, 1944 - and there we fought in the Slovak National Uprising. There were flights like partisans. It was much more complicated there, because the Slovaks had the same equipment as the Germans. And now in that rugged mountain terrain looking for machine gun batteries, it was difficult. We were there as fighters. So, we attacked the Germans, convoys of German cars. It was a tough fight there."
"I say, it was like a swarm of bees, you had to watch all the time - that's why we wore a scarf like that or a woman's stocking so that we wouldn't scrape our neck, because he had to watch what was going on in the back. And when there was an escort of Hawker Hurricanes which attacked the ships, I escorted them as well. And of course, such a ship… there was nothing to do, they dropped bombs, we fired from cannons. It was practically attacking in the middle of the fire, so it was a good luck that the man got it out, he went straight to the fire. Something else was the fights… and again, a man still had to look where his enemy was. There was a radar in England, they had it, so they already controlled us with the radar, for example in 6000 there are Germans, and it was indicated by the watch - it was twelve o'clock in advance, they gave us the height and approximately the number. Maybe twenty plus… it could have been twenty-three. It was somehow determined how many of them there are approximately."
Stanislav Hlučka was born on October 19, 1919 in Blažovice near Brno. He was apprenticed as a mechanical locksmith. In 1937, he signed up for the „Thousand Pilots to the Republic“ call and was accepted into the Masaryk Aviation League. In 1939 he started the industrial school in Brno, he became involved in resistance activities in the process of hiding weapons in Zbrojovka. A year later, he ran away via Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Lebanon to France and later to Great Britain, where he flew as a pilot of the 313rd Fighter Squadron of the RAF. In February 1944 he went with a group of pilots led by František Fajtl to the Soviet Union. There they created the 1st Czechoslovak separate fighter air regiment in the USSR, with which they fought in the autumn of 1944 during the Slovak National Uprising. After the war he worked as a test pilot for the Scientific Aviation Institute, in 1948 he was arrested and imprisoned in Pankrác and Bory. He was rehabilitated in 1968, and after 1989 he became significantly involved in the rehabilitation of war veterans persecuted by the communist regime. Since 1992 he was the chairman of the Association of Foreign Pilots. On October 28, 2005, President Václav Klaus awarded him the Order of T. G. Masaryk for his outstanding contributions to democracy and human rights. Stanislav Hlučka died on October 15, 2008.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
