Jan Pavlíček

“We had eleven light tanks, the Stuarts, sixteen and a half tons. These tanks had the tracks made of rubber. Actually, the core part was obviously made of steel, but it was covered with rubber, and thus when we were riding on a road, it did not make any noise. A normal tank makes a lot of clattering noise when it is moving, but on these rubber tracks it was like a car. These tanks could go at a speed of hundred kms per hour. We had a 45-mm cannon, a machine gun in the front and a machine gun on top of the turret, and another one, an anti-tank machine gun, in the turret.”

“In Dunkerque, the area between the French shore and harbour itself was flooded, with the exception of several metres or kilometres, this zone was full of water the Germans let in there during the high tide. This way, they have minimized the area which posed a risk to them. The part between the sea and the canal, which lead from Dunkerque to De Panne, that’s a French town on the seaside. But this canal leads further away from the shore, about three to four kilometres inland, and our motorized battalion was in charge of this first section between the sea and the canal. And we were in charge of another part, which reached from this canal, which went all the way from the Belgian territory, roughly to the area of Saint-Omer. Saint-Omer was in France, but already deep within the French territory. The rest was assigned to the first tank battalion and to the artillery. We had Canadian artillery as our support units in our section. There were mostly Canadian units there, because we were under the Canadian command.”

“When it happened on November 17th, they wanted to take all of us to a concentration camp. It happened in the morning, I woke up and heard some noise, louder than it was usual in the dorms. I shared a corner room with one student from Ostrava, it was a larger room, a better one than ordinary rooms. My roommate was in Ostrava at that time, his father was the presiding judge of the regional court there. I myself was surprised by the noise. I stepped out of the room to go wash myself, and the Germans were already there and they were forcing us out of the rooms. Before I managed to get to the bathroom, a friend of mine, with whom I had been in theatre the night before, was shouting at me from the yard: ´They will take all of you to a concentration camp!´ The news spread quickly, for those nine students had already been executed. And they were pushing us out. I was still in my pyjamas, and they brought all of us, dressed as we were, down to the dining hall. There was a small podium, with a piano, and then only tables, nothing else. They made us put these tables together, and we all had to stand, none of us was allowed to sit down. And one SS man stood at that raised platform, with a loaded machine gun aimed at us. And we were standing there till 12 o’clock. At twelve the dorm’s manager came, his name was also Frank, but this was pure coincidence, he had nothing in common with Germans. He came, and the German soldiers left, and he told us that we were terribly lucky, for some German officers were also staying in this dorm building, and it was only thanks to them that we had not been taken to Ruzyně.”

“We requested to be transferred to Eisenhower. And they were saying this was not possible, because his was a different section. The Americans were in charge of a completely different section than the English. They English held a northern section on the Rhine River. For this reason, it was not easy for them logistics-wise. And naturally, soldiers are experts at making mess, so they wanted to avoid such transfers if possible. Therefore they did not want to let us go there. And this was their principal mistake, for otherwise we would really have liberated Prague, it would be no problem at all.”

“You know, it is very simple. To honour one’s country, one’s republic, because when there is no freedom, then there is no personal freedom, either, like the freedom you have today. You would not have had it without this love for the country and self-sacrifice. You see, I had ten opportunities to take to my heels. In any case, in the position I had as a surveyor, my life cannot be compared to the life I would have led had I remained abroad. This is not a problem. Our problem is to be free, not to enjoy extraordinary quality of life. Because affluence without freedom is good for nothing.”

“I tell you, it was unfortunate that they refused to transfer us to the Americans, otherwise it would have been us who liberated Prague, and not the Soviets. The Soviets arrived to Prague only as if for a visit. Prague had already been liberated before by the Vlasov soldiers. They only boast of having liberated Prague. You know, I have such a theory of mine, that our liberation after the war came only as late as in 1989.”

“You know, I valued our arrival to England most of all. Because I could see that Hitler really had no chance of winning this war. After the fall of France, when we got to England. I could see that now there was a super tenacious enemy standing against Hitler, that this was not a country like Poland or Czechoslovakia, but an enemy which was extremely difficult or impossible to defeat. I would say that for me this was certainly a new beginning, so to speak, when I first saw England.”

“Of course, I don’t say that all Germans were Nazis. I cannot claim that. Like my classmate, who was with me till the fourth grade of higher elementary. His father was a miner in Karviná. He wanted him to become a businessman, and admonished him to learn Czech properly. So he was in my class till the fourth grade and then he went to study a trade academy. And this boy was then serving in the wehrmacht. Since he could speak good Czech, they were using him as an interpreter when interrogating captives; he was serving on the eastern front. He was doing fine, till he got to a group which was carrying out the interrogations, and one of the Germans present there could understand some Polish, or Czech and Slovak. So what happened was that this friend of mine was interpreting the answer of that Polish or Slovak prisoner, and he did not translate his answer precisely. He simply wanted to help this Slovak guy. And the German jumped in: ´That is not true, he did not say it this way!´ My friend was immediately transferred to a disciplinary troop.”