Karel Mynář

"We were eating rice. Even today I can´t even see the rice. I´d rather have got potatoes or bread than rice with meat. It was just rice, rice and nothing else. We were also receiving some thin peppers, which were hot as hell. After some while I got used to it and I didn´t mind eating them anymore. Sometimes we also got some salt, but that was rather exceptional. Even soldiers’ didn´t have any salt sometimes."

„My motif? Well first of all I wanted to see the world. We stopped in dockyard in Veltrusy, it was a small dock yard. We were waiting for a while so we went to Veltrusy. It was just before the election and the leaflets were just being distributed. I remember the election catchword: ´Vote the butt, vote the thigh, just don´t vote the number one.´ Number one belonged to the communist party. We listened to their nonsense and all kinds of crap there. It was much worse than it is today. So I finally said to myself - I´m out of here, this is nothing for me. Instead of listening we went to the park. I took the very first chance for me to leave. I left without reconsidering it. I packed my stuff and I was gone."

"What a welcome party was it at the main train station! A police transporter was waiting there for us. They took us straight to Bartolomějská Street. After that we went to Pankrác prison hospital for quarantine. From the hospital we went to Mladá Boleslav where the lower military prosecutor was located. It was quite okay there. We were not separated in cells, we could stay together. We even had a shaving razor there. There was some guy- Němeček was his name, who used to shave us. He told us he was a barber. The truth is he always did a good job. The prosecutor brought the razor and said: ´Just don´t cut your throat.´ We even had a ping-pong table on the hallway. But we were bored anyway. We asked for some work to do. We were happy when they gave us the mica to peel."

"Some Polish agent came to us. There were more of us. He told us that if we would go to France with him, he could guarantee, that we would be on the first transport ship to Australia. That was what I wanted originally. But the reality was that when we arrived to Landau we went to the office and this guy gave us there some documents to sign, all in French. Then he entered the door and we never saw him since. They took us in one by one and spoke to us only in French. This way we signed ours own verdict.”