Josef Kadlčík

“So they went there, they reached the bird’s nest [lookout tower], climbed to the top, and kept watch. They were supposed to patrol along the [tower] walkway, per regulations, and not hide in the cabin, when it wasn’t raining. It was in summer. They patrolled the walkway, and then Resutík came up and told Kříž he was going to the toilet and to have a drink of water. We used to go to an outhouse close to where the glass presser’s was together with a small spring. The trappers went by. Resutík had already climbed down. There was a tunnel leading under the wires. He went through the tunnel and off he was. And he’d told [Kříž] he was going to have a drink of water, but Kříž didn’t know. They hadn’t been shown the land, those boys, the rookies. No one showed them. When we joined the company, he took us and showed us around and told us: ‘Here’s this, here’s that, and it’s customary to do so and so,’ and then the next day we did a demarcation exercise, that is, to see where the actual border lies. At that location it was a stream, the border line was. And these rookies hadn’t undergone that. Perhaps that saved his life. So he went through the tunnel and crossed the grass strip into the copse where the Germans were.”

“Well, in the end what happened was, regarding the UAC [united agricultural cooperative], that Mum joined; they were already over fifty years old. Dad had a job at the brickworks. But [they had] quotas or duties that were required of a UAC member, a certain number of labour units. And those units were measured like hell. Say, they were supposed to weed a ‘měřice’ [‘measure’, generally approx. 60 litres] of beet, but if you’d measure it properly, it would’ve been almost two měřice. That’s how all the quotas were. And when it was time for them, Mum, to get pension, and they applied for a pension, because while they were at home, before the UAC ended, Dad paid the social security, so it applied to them. But when they reached pension age, they found out [Mum] officially hadn’t worked any hours there.”