Erhard Chrobák

"Then I was like a German, because they [the Germans] took Hlučín region and pulled it out of Bohemia. Then they all had to go to war. Me too. I was seventeen years old, not even yet. I was drafted to the office in Opava, and they told me that I was to enter the service in a few days, and that I should have food with me for three days. My mother prepared bread and everything for me and I went to Opava to the office. There were German cars there, and everyone who had been summoned from Hlučín region got into the cars and they took us to Ratiboř. There, in the playing field, I saw a lot of German cars. Then the German commander came and we had to line up. There were a couple of hundred, seven hundred or eight hundred, maybe more, of us from the villages in the Hlučín region who had reached the age of seventeen. Then they told us: 'It is war, you must be understanding. You all are going to Poland to dig trenches.’ But then they changed it. They put us in cars and drove us to Germany."

"They took us to Pacov, which was somewhere in Bohemia. There were barracks there, bombed out, everything was broken. And that is where they took us prisoners. The older Czech soldiers were already there as wardens. I was there for about two months, maybe six weeks. We were given food, but not much. There was a big fenced area and I saw people walking behind the fence. And suddenly I saw this gentleman – a small man – and a dog. I thought, I have to do something. I found a pencil and a piece of paper, and I wrote my name and where I was. And I threw it over the fence. The little dog flew to it, picked it up, but the master took my note away from him. Then all of a sudden, my sister came. She was twenty or twenty-one years old. The man sent it. And my sister was brave and came to the camp. She came to the guardhouse and she wanted to talk to me: 'No, no. He has to do his time. Out! Get out.'"