“Nobody can ever destroy it. Only once, when a six-ton bomb was dropped there, it slightly sank into the sand. For otherwise it’s only iron and concrete.”
“Food was being prepared for the front, it had to be cooked for a given number of persons. Our canteen boss would decide what to cook. One of the top cooks came from Italy (from the government army – auth.´s note), thus he had experience. We were praised for cooking well. Breakfasts in the morning included some meat, most often we would have porridge. It was a mush made of oat flakes, the boys just loved that. Or we had beans with bacon, we were not used to these, either. While there, we were being supplied by the English, and later, when we came over to the American zone, we were supplied by the Americans. We were further away from Dunkerque, in a city cinema or something like that, which was assigned to us. It was not possible to cook in Dunkerque, there was artillery fighting going on, so we had to stay further away. The garages for vehicle repairs were also behind us.”
“When the training was over, it was my bad luck that I was skilled pastry-cook, and a unit which would go to the front was being formed. They have already selected people, those from the government army all went there, and also those who have had a training in the German army. The 3rd artillery section was being formed, there were two sections already near Dunkerque, we were to be the third one. I don’t even remember the commander’s name. We all formed up in ranks in that playground and suddenly my name was called. I was the only one of them who went to the front. All the others who were there were ordered to go to Scotland for tank training. They got to Scotland, but my friend did not get there. He went for a medical examination, and since he was a smoker, his veins and lungs were all in a mess. He did not get there at all. After that he wrote to me to the front several times, but then the letters stopped coming. At nights the cooks and everybody had to report for duty, we had to guard the channels and everything. They got to the rear of the French, during a low tide, and they massacred them there.” “What kind of an action was it? Getting at their rear and shooting them?” “There were some eight thousand of Germans there. Some said eight thousand, some said ten thousand. During the German attack in the Ardennes. They wanted to get hold of petrol, they had no petrol. (The Germans surrounded in Dunkerque – auth.´s note) somehow knew about it, through messages, they were being supplied by airplanes. They wanted to get away, some of them got to the rear and ran away. Thus we had to be on guard. It was pitch dark, you did not know what was where. You could not light a lamp. If something just moved, each of us fired a shot right there, that was it. There was nothing else to do.”
“Josef Švajgl, I was born in Velhartice on March 6, 1923. My father had a farm, six hectares of fields, two hectares of meadows, a couple of horses, three cows and seven children. I was born as the third one. My childhood was all work in the field. I attended five grades of school in Velhartice, and from the sixth grade there was a higher elementary in Kolinec. Schools were paid for by the village, we had to pay 100 crowns admission fee, plus we had to buy the necessary supplies and books elsewhere for some little money. This was another one hundred crowns. It was six kilometres from Kolinec to Velhartice, we would walk the distance in summer and in winter as well. The school in Kolinec was for three years, I was passing quite well. Just one interesting thing – in the first grade, there were sixty of us boys, and the girls were in a separate place, there were less of them.”
“(While clearing away corpses of German soldiers after the explosion in port Saint-Nazaire – auth.´s note). Our boys had gloves and the dead German officers were clothed in leather. When our boys grabbed it, the bones fell out. I have seen it. We got to them, but I don’t know how many of them were there. The Germans did not want to talk about it at all. Besides that, when it exploded, one Englishman jumped out from a submarine and wanted to reach the second gate leading to another department, but they shot him.. One German always used to say: ´See, I got a friend in Lorient. I will bring fish and we make smoked fish. I told this to the boys and they said: ´Take it, you will smoke them and we will eat them.´ Even though we were not hungry. So I was smoking them and we were also giving them to Germans (drafted from the Sudetenland – auth. ´s note). They were getting along with us pretty well while we were doing the repairs together. When I was smoking the fish for the first time, one German told me: ´You should not make the fire too big, if you overdo it, they will fall through.´ I also dropped the fish I had on the lower rack. The boys learnt that there were many eels there. One of them made a cylindrical wire net, threw some bread in it, put it in the water, and in the morning we pulled it out and it was full of eels. I smoked them, the grease was dripping from them, it was delicious. But one day during the high tide, they were saying it was the highest tide ever, we were standing there and looking down and wandering why there were some many eels there, it was just teeming with eels. There was a corpse of a German. Since that time I did not want any eels.”
“We were crossing the English Channel to Southend, but it was full of ships so we had to wait till the morning before it was our turn. As we were crossing the channel, the waves were beating against the hull so fiercely that the boys feared the ship would sink. But it was all right. We disembarked in Southend, boarded a train and we continued to another English camp in London. There we got out and they started counting us. As we were standing, we suddenly heard a trrrrrrrrr sound. We did not know what it was. The Englishmen were already running away and hiding and we were looking for some hole as a shelter. It was a V1, flying over us and we saw the blazing flame behind it. It dropped one kilometre behind us.”
“We did not even know that self-propelled guns arrived to that wood – and the villagers probably did not know it either – and they were shooting over the alley at the Germans who were riding away on the right-hand side. It was five kilometres away from us, we did not know about them. I said we could not stay there. By chance we took a look and there was a potato field, and through these potatoes we got up there. We reached the wood, sat down and waited what would happen next. Suddenly there was a jeep coming and a guy with a machine-gun riding in it. We ran after him, waving at him, and he opened fire at us from that machine-gun. We took cover behind a tree like hares before it/until it stopped. I stayed behind the first tree, I did not go any further, while they continued running and I got lost and suddenly I remained there alone. So I climbed up a tree and looked at the meadows behind. My friend was passing that meadow he was far away, so I ran behind him and I got to another village. There were partisans there, so I told them who I was. They said: ´Do not go anywhere, it both sides are mixed here, there are both of them. The Americans are over there, the Germans are over there.´”
“I am terribly sorry that our war history is not taught in schools. Teachers were not even interested in us coming and saying something to the children.”
Warrant-officer in retirement Josef Švajgl was born March 6, 1923 in Velhartice in the Klatovy district. He learnt a pastry-cook’s trade and in March 1943 he was called to support the Third Reich by doing forced labour. Via Berlin he got to Saint-Nazaire in France, where the local port was in ruins after an English bombardment, and Josef Švajgl was working on its reconstruction. After the completion of the work and the construction of a new gates there came the Allied invasion to Normandy, and the German army began retreating inland. In the ensuing commotion, Josef Švajgl together with fourteen other friends decided to defect to the Allies, but they accidentally got into a front line between the Germans and Americans. In August 1944 he eventually ended in POW camps in France, in December 1944 this was followed by a transfer to England, where after a short internment he went through military training. In January 1945 he joined the units which were conquering the fort Dunkerque. As a skilled pastry-cook he cooked in the field kitchen and at the same time he served in a four-member night watch with the 3rd Artillery Section. He returned home on May 18, 1945 and for the following year, he was training army entrants in various place in Czechoslovakia. He was demobilized in 1946. Thanks to his cousin’s help he became a civil-servant and after further training he became a construction and maintenance worker. He retired in 1982. Josef Švajgl died on February 6th, 2019.
