“It was bad in Saudi Arabia as we didn't know what would happen next. We went somewhere 15 kilometers at night because the madman (Hussein) let some Scud in there (...) We were scared of poison gases. And it was there. I went with (another Czech) Svoboda to buy a watch. We were dressed in French uniforms and we heard them speaking. I pushed him and said to him in French: 'They are Czechs.' And he replied: 'Let's go to them. Hello.' They were staring at us. 'You come from France and you speak Czech? Aaah, legionnaires!' So we had a chat. They did a good job there. Whenever anything happened they judged it well. We had a small white camel there. We made a gas mask for him as well but we didn't manage to put in on for him, it was so fast. When we came back he was dead. So the gas was there.”
“The greatest action in which I participated was the one in Kolwezi in Zaire in 1978. We were four hundreds against four thousands. It was done within three days. I'm not surprised that they shot a lot there then. We had a task there. Four companies parachuted, they told us we were parachuting onto grass but they didn't tell us it was tall elephantine grass. We had no idea where we were. There were about seven dead people. They cut you or something else even before you managed to undo your tackle and take out your weapon. Our company had a task there – to liberate the school, hospital and hotel Impala. Nothing at school. The children were romping around us when they got out of the school and they wanted to be parachutists as well. We had to push them away. They were still shooting. There was a report for me to come. I have never seen anything worse in my whole life again but there. If there was one (a rebel) next to me I would probably cut his throat too. There were about forty bodies, all of white people, in the cellar of hotel Impala. A young woman, as the doctor said later, had a cut abdomen and there was a dead fetus in the eighth month next to her. I was not surprised that the men were killing wildly. There was a sniper whose task was to watch over the way, nobody was allowed to go through. He was removed in half an hour since there were six bodies, he shot them all. We had no idea whether he was a rebel or not. The rebels from Katanga started running away when they saw the Legion coming, some of them started changing into their informal clothes. You could recognize just like that that they had tiger tattoos on their shoulders. Then we knew it was him. Their commanders were the Cubans from Angola and the Germans from DDR (the German Democratic Republic). We heard Spanish and German on the radio. What were the East Germans like, 'nice ...'”
“I got on a train and went to Strasbourg. I arrived in the morning, I still had some time to go for coffee. Coffee is international so I asked for coffee. I paid still with Marks, it was possible in Strasbourg. I saw some policemen with caps. They laughed at me because there was a film on TV those days – the comedy Cheque Sans Provision (note: Bad Cheque), which sounds as a Czech without commission (resources). They laughed at me, I was mad. Eventually they called me, I went to barracks, I had a check-up and in a couple of days I went to Aubagne. It is a kind of Mekka, you get in there, sign it there. You have to go through there on your way back. I took some tests there. They told me: 'You'll go for training now.' I embarked a ship to Corsica and it started being hard. We disembarked and you didn't understand a word and then they shouted at us and it was tough. I kept saying to myself: 'What on earth I had done. You don't understand anything so shut up and you'll see what will come out of it.'”
“Hopefully I haven't forgotten anything. I was in some wars but it's hard to talk about it. And here when we started talking about it, the first question was : 'How many did you kill?' I don't know and I probably never will. But I would never kill a man in front of me just like that. I could never do that.”
“I will not hear a word said against the Legion, the Legion made me a man, it helped me a lot. I found myself alone in the world; I was not quite ready for it yet. I will remember my number up to the present time even if I just wake up.”
“I was stopped by a police patrol when I went by car and they made an assault on a policeman out of it. He probably knew who I was. I got a blow in the door getting out of the car. I kicked the car and wanted to drive away. They caught me anyway and I got such a thrashing that I have never forgotten that. I got eighteen months. It was is 1971.”
“Yeah and in our passports... We couldn't write an exit permit just like that. We printed the inscription exit permit on a children press to our passport and put a stamp made with a one Czechoslovak Crown coin. When I was handing in my passport at the embassy in France in the '90s, the officials could kill themselves laughing. They couldn't believe that we were let abroad with such documents. Our first attempt to fake it failed, I had to tear the page out and another one fell out with it. Without two pages... the man had to know it (the one who was letting us go).”
Antonín Hruška was born in a Communist official family in 1946. His father studied in Moscow between 1952-1955. Antonín Hruška wanted to be a soldier since his fifth school year. He decided to study at military high school in Poprad. He graduated in 1965, was a lieutenant at 20 already and started a service with signalmen at a general staff in Prague. In 1968 he engaged in the social changes of this year, he for instance pasted up posters against the Soviet occupation. He was dismissed from the Army during the vetting in 1969.
He was sentenced to 18 months for assaulting a policeman (National Security Police Force member) during a road checking. After his release he decided to emigrate (1974). He fled with a friend via West Berlin to West Germany first. After half a year he joined the Foreign Legion in France. He was assigned to paratroopers with whom he took part in various actions including those in the town of Kolowez in the separatist province Katanga (Shaba) in Zair (Democratic Kongo) in 1978. He got wounded during a parachute jump in Djibouti in 1982. Having been cured he did not come back to paratroopers. He served with motorized infantry. He served at bases including Mayotta or French Guyana in the ‘80s. Towards the end of his career in the Foreign Legion he took part in operations in Kuwait and Iraq in 1991. He moved to the Czech Republic in the ‘90s. He lived in Vižňov at Meziměstí in the Broumov area. Antonín Hruška died on October 13, 2010.
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!
