Antonín Špaček

“Franta Brablík lured me to travel to Slovakia as a contact man. My task was money exchange. The guys who were fleeing from the Protectorate needed some money. But in Slovakia, the local banknotes have already been re-stamped. All the fifty-, hundred- and higher value banknotes now bore the Slovak State stamp .My task was to find somebody in Slovakia who would exchange the money for us. Thanks to another friend from the cadet academy, certain Pepík Čech, a Legiobanka employee from Olomouc, I got contacts for some people in Bratislava. I was depositing the money on Olomouc. In Olomouc I would be given a small paper note with a stamp and the amount written on it, I would hide it somewhere in the lining of my coat and go to Bratislava. There, in the Bratislava branch of Legiobanka, I would receive Slovak money in exchange for the money which had been deposited in the Protectorate. But not only the Slovak currency, but also Yugoslav dinars, French francs, Hungarian pengő, different foreign currencies. Legiobanka had its main office in Prague and all its branches in Slovakia were closed down, because as you know, Slovakia declared independence and formed their own Slovak State, and Bohemia and Moravia became occupied by Germans. I had been doing this till January 18th 1940, when our organization broke up when one of our air force members in air force academy in Prostějov got arrested. There was a danger that I might also be found, because I had been in touch with him. So I did not return to the Protectorate and instead escaped from Slovakia to Hungary.”

“To give you an idea what we went through there: wasted five and a half years of the war without any hope that we would get back alive. And then, three years after the war, when a bunch of blockheads turned us into traitors… When the Germans were murdering and destroying the elite of the nation during the war here, well, they were enemies, it was their plan to depopulate our territory; when Heydrich came to power, he summoned his officers to the Castle and told them about his plan with the Czech population: one third to be murdered, one third to be Germanized, and one third to be moved away. (criticism of communists follows – auth.) For one this is hard to bear, you know. When I lecture – I have delivered several speeches already – I always say: What Czech mother was capable of giving birth to those monsters, who chose such an abominable course? Against their own people…If it was Germans, it was during the war, and we knew it was in their manifesto, but our own people against us?”

“When I saw the multitude of foreign soldiers who were present, and all those presidents, and the Queen of England with her husband, and our president and his wife…I had tears in my eyes. I remembered our boys, whom we buried in 1940 at Seina, Marna, and Loira. And I remembered our pilots who died on the French soil and on the British soil. And our bomber planes crew, in the waves of the Atlantic. And I also remembered our boys from the eastern front, who did not have the chance to be there. And I took several of the boys from the east with me to France, so that they might see what it was like and how much respect they have for us there. And I thought why it was me who was the first to be decorated. And one thing occurred to me, perhaps it was the true reason. A thing came to my mind: perhaps it was because Czechoslovakia was the first country betrayed by France.”

“On Thursday I was fired, on Friday I made a round of all the three institutes and on Monday evening somebody came to my flat. I was not at home. I was told – I eventually heard a bell ringing – that somebody was ringing at my door. And on Tuesday morning at five thirty they arrested me. The court came to a conviction that if the accused Špaček had not been able to leave the country legally – for he had applied for an emigrant passport – he would have emigrated illegally like he did in 1939 and as a former military officer would have revealed matters and facts which were confidential, and thus would have been guilty of high treason. The facts of the case were not met, but the court reached the decision that if I had emigrated, I would have…And at that time I was already six months out of the army, so what secrets were there to leak? Nevertheless, the court did come to that conclusion, and there it was – ten years. And I went. I spent five and a half years in imprisonment, the last two of which I was employed in the Jáchymov mines. And when I was released, I decided to continue working in the mining industry, because I could not do anything else! After my graduation from secondary school, I went to the army, from the army to jail, and in jail I began working manually as a miner. I returned to the Jáchymov mines as a civilian and spent there – without two months – full eleven years. Meaning I have spent a total of twelve years and ten months by working in the mines in Jáchymov.”