Lieutenant Václav Hrdlička

* 1926

  • “I got a little advice from my colleagues from CIC. I walked on to České Budějovice and then to Český Krumlov. A family lived there – I don’t remember their names anymore but they helped with the way. I got directly to the border and was very fortunate because I got to Austria without problems. When I came to the border I saw a high barbed-wire fence that stretched for miles with no end. I thought there was no way how to make it through but then I realized that those people told me about a crossing point for military personnel that was supposed to be somewhere nearby. I eventually found it and crossed the border. Then I ran for about ten or fifteen minutes because it was still Czechoslovak territory. When I passed the Austrian customs house I knew I was finally free. The passage underneath the fence wasn’t secured although it was hardly a hundred meters away from the guarding tower and the road. They must have thought that no one would dare to choose this place. Moreover, the place was heavily covered by grass and bushes.”

  • “In our town, there lived several hundreds of Jews and Poles and about six Czech families. The Jewish population made up the majority. When the Germans came, they put all the Jews into a ghetto that was formed about six months after the arrival of the Germans. In the ghetto, the Jews were left to wait for their death. There was a gorge nearby the town. They took them there and stripped them off their clothes. Then they took them into another part of the gorge and shot them there. About a thousand people were killed there, including little children. They managed to kill them all within three to four hours. Recently, I went to the place, I think it was in 1990 or 1996. The bones can still be seen in the gorge. They stick out of the ground. It has to be because of the rain. Some of the victims fell into the river. I saw these executions with my own eyes. People from the town went to the place out of curiosity to see what was happening. They didn’t know what the Germans had planned. I didn’t believe they would really shoot them. I thought they just wanted to rob them of all they had. Then I saw the shootings. I saw my friends, my teacher and our neighbors being shot. They were stripped naked and then they were dead.”

  • “You can hardly imagine how tired we were. Once, I fell asleep and only woke up after 24 hours. When I woke up I was all covered with mud and dirt and I had no idea where I was. My unit had long been gone, it had marched forward and they simply left me behind. The only thing I had with me was a radio device and a set of headphones. I had no clue how I got there or how it happened. Something must have exploded while I was asleep and covered me with earth. But I was unharmed.”

  • “I felt real pity for them. I saw the Polish army and I saw the Russian army. Compared to the Poles, the Russian soldiers were beggars. Can you imagine that the Russian soldiers didn’t know what an apple was? It was in the autumn and we were selling them apples. They were cooking their food in buckets that seemed more fit for pigs than for humans. Even my dog wouldn’t eat their food. They were really miserable people. Additionally, they weren’t allowed to leave their garrisons. It must have been like being in a cage. Their coats were thin and they were constantly cold. And their technology? Well, you could hear their tanks rattle from miles away so you always knew they were coming. Anyway, I didn’t see much in the way of technology in their army. It was more like horses and carts.”

  • “We tried to live our lives so as to serve as an example. We fought for something. We fought so that the generation of today wouldn’t need to suffer hardship. But what do we see today. Crime, hatred, fraud. This doesn’t lead anywhere. This generation is drowning itself. I lived for forty years abroad but I’ve never seen what I see here in Bohemia. We don’t even have a government. If such a tiny country cannot agree on its statehood, then I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel like. I’m not Swedish, nor Czech nor Ukrainian. Although I have Czech citizenship, it’s no god to me because today, all I can do is be ashamed for being a Czech. I deeply regret that I came back.”

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    Praha, 26.08.2006

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I hated Communism so much that it is impossible to express it with mere words

Václav Hrdlička was born on June 16, 1926, in Teremno in Volhynia. His parents were Czechs by origin. His father, Karel, was a saddle maker and his mother, Anastázie, née Damašková, took care of the household. Václav went at first to school in Teremno and after the family moved to Boremlo he continued his studies there till 1939. In the time of the German occupation of Volhynia, he witnessed the extermination of the local Jewish community. At that time, he also started to work in a specialized German military vehicles repair shop. In 1943, the situation came to a head and Mr. Hrdlička had to go into hiding in order to avoid the rampage of the Russians and the Ukrainian nationalists. A year later, he decided to join the Czechoslovak army. He witnessed the Battle for the Dukla Pass and the fights nearby Machnowka and Wrocanka, where the 1st Czechoslovak army corps suffered heavy losses. After a few weeks, he was wounded and transported to a hospital in Řešov in Poland. After he recovered from his wounds, he was sent back home to Volhynia. Shortly after his return home, he was forced by the Soviet political police (NKVD) to join a company searching for deserters and the Ukrainian nationalists hiding in the area. He fled after a couple of months and in January or February 1945, he was with the army again. He then worked in the supply unit in Humenný. He was later assigned to a specialized unit called “Stovka” (one hundred) that was supposed to transport military material from Romania to Czechoslovakia. However, this unit never really started to operate. After the end of hostilities, he was demolizided for health reasons and was sent home to Volhynia again. After a couple of months, he left again and went to Czechoslovakia to serve in the army again for a short time. He was demobilized for good in September or October 1946 and he was given a small grocery store in Šumperk, where he stayed till 1948. In that year, his store was confiscated. Gradually, his whole family moved from Volhynia to Teplicko. He started to work for the CIC organization that helped people who wanted to leave Czechoslovakia with the border crossings. He was caught and arrested by border guards from Eastern Germany and held in detention. After he was released, he worked as a miner in Ostrava and as a forester in the Teplicko region. However, CIC soon got in touch with him again and he started to work for the organization one more time. He illegally crossed the border to the Soviet Union in order to make contact with the Ukrainian nationalists and start an uprising. In 1952, he was arrested by NKVD agents, sentenced and taken to Siberia where he spent a couple of months. Thanks to Stalin’s death in 1953, he was amnestied and released from prison. He returned to Czechoslovakia and immediately began to plan his escape to the West. He fled to Austria and then moved on to Sweden where he lived for the next 40 years with his wife, a Czech by origin as well. He returned to Czechoslovakia after the revolution of 1989 in the beginning of the nineties.