Otakar Rambousek

“Then I’d have to walk in the dark through terrain where you could easily break a leg. Stumbling over potato patches or fields of beet, or even corn, which was a metre high. Well, pushing your way through that, you were wet up to your thighs from the dew. It didn’t matter when going to Germany, but when going in, you needed to look as if you’d gotten up just half an hour ago. Early in the morning, at five o’clock, when the first train left. Whichever train, just to get away from Cheb, whether it was to Karlovy Vary or to Pilsen. The first train that left, I’d jump into and say: ‘I came at the last moment, give me a ticket.’ I’d buy a ticket from the conductor when things went like that. The amount of baggage you can carry is limited when you have to overcome several kilometres of rough terrain. That was not our purpose, to carry things, the main thing was the post. The liaison at the other end took all the post, the messages, and the reports.”

“The situation was that we didn’t come up against anyone the whole time. We descended one floor at a time. At about quarter past, half past four, I’d say approximately, we reached the entrance hall. In the meantime the SS, whether they had or didn’t have wounded or dead members, they took off, they had a bus stationed somewhere, and they’d left. In the whole radio building, when it was over, there was just one dead man lying on a bench by the tuning room on the ground floor. One of our state policemen, complete with cloak and helmet. That was the only victim inside that I saw. The civilian employees were hidden away somewhere because they knew the place. But there was no man-to-man combat there. Because of course, and understandably, those old German geezers and SS men, the few who were there... they weren’t in a hurry to rush into real combat, into a firefight... Nowadays those memorial plaques have a pretty list of names, but those were all from the street. People who came to help the Radio and were shot. When we finished inside, there was one dead man lying there.”