Doc. RNDr., Csc. Bohuslav Strauch

“...Ludvík Svoboda had a speech there that we didn’t like. The reason we didn’t like it was that he spoke about some united youth under the umbrella of the federation. This was in 1946 and we didn’t like the famous general’s speech, the speech of the leader of legendary armies.”

“There was an SS-Kraftfahr-Park with lined-up Ukrainians wearing SS uniforms. They were not Vlasov’s men – these were SS men. One of them was sitting on the fountain. We came to him and asked him how it was possible that he’s wearing a German uniform and was Ukrainian. He took a post stamp with Hitler on it, spat on it and said: ‘Gitler něcharašo, Stalin něcharašo, Churchill charašo!’ This was the definition of how he understood things.”

“At lights-out, we had to march and sing various songs about Korea and that ‘who’s not with us is against us’. There was a verse saying ‘we’ll meet at work’ but we would sing instead ‘we’ll meet at the Palace’. Palácka or ‘The Palace’ was a bar and a hotel in Ostrava where the members of the PTP would go quite often. He shouted: ‘stop singing! Sing again!’ But we sang again ‘we’ll meet at the Palace’. So he drove us outside and we had to perform an air-raid alert exercise running around the barracks. There were quite absurd situations arising from this – for instance, the boys would make graveyard crosses during that exercise. We ran around the barracks and there was this notorious pub that is referred to in Maryčka Magdonová from Petr Bezruč. Right next to that pub, he said again that there’s an air-raid alert. At the moment he said this, all the lads were in the pub, except for Imrich Hanušovský from Košice, who shouted at the women walking from the bus station: “Ladies, come and lie down in the ditch, there’s an air-raid alert’.”

“By coincidence, I was at the cemetery. Suddenly, I heard some uproar. I didn’t know what was going on was so I went to find out. As soon as I saw it, I ran away. I didn’t want to see it. They were beating them and then they executed them. Eventually, they had to exhume them anyway as it happened behind the graveyard wall. These were useless and nasty excesses.”

“The office of employment sent us, the students of grammar schools to a hops farm where we would help to collect the hops. It was in the Sudetenland, in the region of Litoměřice and Úštěk. We went there on a transport and by coincidence we passed through Theresienstadt where we saw striped men at work. Previously, the Germans gave us food for the trip – a half loaf of bread and some salami. When we saw these poor slave laborers, all of us started throwing our food in their direction. The transport was about twenty railroad cars long and the students from all the cars were throwing their food to the inmates. Of course, they reacted by eagerly eating it. This was fascinating in a way. Now the German soldiers ran to them with their rifles shouting at them to leave it alone. So we realized that this must be the concentration camp and in fact we saw it with our own eyes. The inmates had a stripe of their hair shaved off to mark them.”

“The public process was in June in a local theater. They exhibited everything they had confiscated from our house. This included the fridge or the provisions of food that we had kept above a certain level. My mom was leasing a field and her leaseholder was giving her some corn. They exhibited this too. My brother was about to marry and he bought a stove and a fridge. They put this on display as well. There were all sorts of things, little things. They exploited everything they could against us. The mood at that time was really horrible; this exceeded all imaginable standard civic behavior.”

“I needed to organize my mother’s funeral so I asked for a five-day leave. The company commander took great joy in testing my knowledge of the code of conduct of a soldier on leave – how he was supposed to behave and the like. He warned me not to get drunk. I told him that I’m going home to bury my mother who had died. He was terribly primitive.”

„Milota Fanderlik had a debate with us in 1968 and 1969. He tried to persuade us that we should establish a department of computers. At that time! But he just had a nose for it. He was a very educated and knowledgeable man. He was a professor.”

“The police and the militia came to our house on March 8, 1951 and they raided the house from top to bottom. They found some merchandise in our house and therefore they arrested my brother and my dad. At the time, I didn’t even know what had happened at home because I was in Prague. I only came home the next week because of conscription. I was returning home at about midnight. I came to our house and saw that it had been sealed. I went to the neighbors, to the local pub, asked them what was going on. They said: ‘you don’t know what happened? Your parents were arrested over a week ago’. I slept over at their place and the next day I went to the conscription and then to the local police station because I needed to pick up some things at our place. I packed what I could inside my suitcase and said goodbye to my former home.”