Oldřich Stergelis

"A very unpleasant part of my job was when we had to pull out drowned men. That was really unpleasant. The river police weren't working there, it was just us. So usually one of us saw a drowned person floating there and made a report. A boat would come out, they'd have to basically tie the person to a rope and tow them away. Because you couldn't land a boat just anywhere. Some places were rocky shores, they couldn't land there, because it would destroy the boat. So they had to drag the drowned person maybe two or three kilometres further, where there was a sandy shore. And there they pulled out the poor man. Then the police came and took care of the rest. But the worst part was ours. I never pulled out a drowned man with my crew, but I was there once when I was coming back from duty, and there he was lying on the shore, a Soviet army soldier who had escaped from Hungary. They had a garrison on the other side in Hungary and he tried to swim across. I said, 'I can't imagine swimming across the Danube.' And he didn't succeed either. It was terrible, a truly horrible sight because the guy had been underwater for 14 days. He looked terrible."

"We got a call from the squad that a boat, a speed boat, was approaching us. And that it didn't respond to the patrols' commands, it didn't want to stop, and that it needed to be stopped at all costs. All right, at all costs. The young guy I had there, he picked up his machine gun. I said to him, 'Put it down, you idiot! You gotta realize one thing. That boat's not going upstream to Austria, it's going downstream. And the next station is Hungary. Who on earth would want to run to Hungary?' Anyway, I called to ask if it was at all costs, and they said it was. And I said I knew how to do it in other way. I waited for him to drive him ashore between the dams, he would crash and then we'd pull him out. But he tricked us. He turned onto the pontoon in Štúrovo, he jumped off, ran away, and before my helmsman could catch him, the police had caught him. But then it turned out he was some guy who got a call that his mother was dying. Well, he just drove and drove and didn't react to anything. So he got a fine and that was all. That was the only time they told me. Well, they didn't tell me to shoot, they said, 'At all costs.' And they left it up to me as the boat captain to sort it out. So I figured it out the way I did. And it was a reasonable solution. Because it is nonsense to shoot at somebody