Oldřich Kolzrt

“On the 3rd and 4th, people were taking down the German signs and then a German truck full of soldiers suddenly arrived there. We were on the town square and they were shooting in the air. Of course, we tried to run away into some back alley, and I was running with the others towards the glassmakers’ school. Fortunately there was one house where they opened the door for us and we squeezed inside. But then they left and there were no problems anymore. Only when they led the German captives through Brod into some assembly centre - I don’t know where they were sending them, but the processions of prisoners were passing through the town square and there they were scrutinized if there were any SS members among them, because they were the worst. The German army was better in their treatment of people, relatively speaking, compared to SS men, and those who had the SS symbol tattooed on them or displayed on their uniforms were put to prison in the town square in Brod. At the same time, prisoners from concentration camps were returning from the direction of Liberec, and one person from Brod was among them. What followed… I don’t know, because I ran away from there. Naturally, they wanted to take revenge on the SS men for what they had been through, and they would for instance grab a cobblestone and start beating the SS men.”

“When I left the Communist Party, I wrote that I wanted to preserve my right to have my own opinion, and that I would not allow myself to be restricted by anybody in the future; that was one thing. Then in 1968 I also signed the 2000 Words Manifesto, and I thus made my opinions public here. As for my membership in the Party, I do not want to make any excuses about it; that would be the same as to say that I was unable to refuse, it does not serve anything, anyway. Almost everyday in the afternoon I was a coach in some sports club, be it volleyball or basketball, and I usually planned the training sessions to coincide with the Party meetings. At the end of the year they thus summed it up: well, comrade Kolzrt attended only one of the meetings, but that was because he serves as a coach in these sports clubs, and it was all right.”

“And then I received a letter from the regional administration committee that I was expelled from my job in school for the reason that I would corrupt the youth and disrupt their socialist thinking, and that I could not be employed in any other school, either.”