Bedřich Kudláč

“There were no direct attacks, only Englishmen and Americans flying from England to Germany – they started flying via Norway instead of directly. One day, some stupid German shot at them, and one Englishman or American didn’t like it, came back and dropped an egg on us. We called the bombs ‘eggs’. That was it; we were swimming. Nobody stopped, it was like, ‘Heads up, leave the boat!’. And we jumped into water. I was in school all the time; the practice on the minelayer – well either the mines had been all deployed or there were no minelayers available, so eventually I served on a submarine. It was an adventure for a seventeen year-old boy. I was out on the sea three times on the submarine. It was a small, older one; most likely obsolete by then, and there were about eighteen or twenty people on board, not more.” – “What was your task on the submarine?” – “I was the radio operator’s apprentice. It meant I had to listen to the sonar – all the sounds and noises, and then write a report, but the reports were encrypted. You didn’t know what others were writing to you, or what you were transmitting. Everything was encrypted – just digits, nonsensical letters, and there was an encryption officer.”

“We spoke about it at home because Hitler grabbed the power and so on. My father was a social democrat so he was in trouble because of that. He and my brother, who was born in ’24, handed out leaflets against Hitler. That was in 1933. Of course, the Nazis found out. My brother was in a concentration camp, but he survived and came back home. I was officially a German then; I was seventeen. It happened because my sister wanted to get married. She was born in 1920 and wanted to marry a German. There was a lot of paperwork, and in the paperwork they somehow figured out that there was a boy who could serve in the military, and that was me. I got the letter on 1 January 1943. It’s a pity I didn’t keep it… well I didn’t really want to keep it because there was a swastika watermark on it and so on… I found it after the war but I thought I’d leave that in Germany.”