The Germans were exhausted, and they were glad it was over
Karel Szatan was born on 19 September 1926 in Segré in the department of Maine-et-Loire, France, to Czech parents Karel and Marta (née Papírková), who had moved to France for work. His father was a miner, and so they changed locations often. Karel Szatan’s clearest memories are from the northern French village of Amy, where he attended school and experienced the war. As a talented pupil, he passed teaching exams in 1940 and started teaching local children at primary school as just a fourteen-year-old. That same year he and his mother fled from the Germans to the western coast, to Brest. They returned home three months later, but they had to live in the neighbouring village because Amy had been taken up by a German unit. The witness’s father joined the Czechoslovak exile army in Agde in 1940. Four years later Karel Szatan Jr also joined the Czechoslovak forces. He underwent training in Great Britain, and on 15 March 1945 he was deployed into combat in a tank unit. The five-man Czech crew of a Cromwell tank, where he served as gunner, fought during the liberation of Dunkirk in northern France. After the war the whole Szatan family returned to Czechoslovakia.