As told by my Dad:
"The military situation in Czechoslovakia was deteriorating quickly in the late 1930's. Our country had some military defense treaties with the United States and England in case of an invasion by the Germans, but when the invasion actually happened nobody came to help us. Russia said, “If France goes, we will go too”, and France said, “If Russia goes, we will go too” Thus we were left just with no help at all, totally under the control of the Germans who quickly invaded our country.
For me that situation created a true chaos. I had been married for a while at that time. I met my wife around 1927, during a dance where the students used to go in the evenings. I was 22 at that time. We dated for five years, as I was not much motivated to marry. I was still living with my parents where I had everything I needed, and so I was just postponing making the commitment. In 1932, however, we finally married in Hranice, where we had a big wedding party. In 1933 Gustav was born. In 1936 Alex was born and then Ivan was born in 1939. We had a stable business, manufacturing and commercializing shotguns and other firearms. Our family life was pretty good until 1938 when the difficulties started once Germany became very determined to invade out country. Until then, life had been kind of the same routine all the time. We worked in the shop from Monday to Saturday and then on Sundays we usually went to spend the day in Hranice. It was around that time that something important happened.
One day I received the visit of a person from Austria who was related to a rebel group that wanted to fight the Austrian fascist wing. They needed more armaments and wanted us to help them to bring (literally smuggle) to Austria the weapons and armaments they had bought from the firm Mouser, in Germany. There was also a shipment of armaments that was provided by the Czech government as a help to their cause. But all those armaments had to reach Austria through the hands of civilians. There could not be an official shipment from the Czech government because Hitler would use it as an excuse to invade our country immediately. Since we had a business which dealt mainly with guns and rifles, we were the perfect company for that transaction, because everything would look just like a common commercial transaction. We decided to help.
Unfortunately on one occasion the Germans apprehended one of those shipments, and after that they wanted to know who in Austria was ordering those weapons. Germany was preparing to invade Austria soon, and they needed more information about that activity. One day when I was driving across the border, coming from Germany back to Czechoslovakia, the inspectors asked me to follow them to the main office, where the higher commander told me that they knew everything about those activities and our involvement in them. They wanted the names of those people in Austria who were involved. They wanted, too, a copy of any document - at least one - which could show what was going on. They would just take a picture of any document I could provide and that would be enough.
After a long debate, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon they offered me 2 million marks. Of course I would not give them any information, so at 10:00 pm they offered me 5 million marks - which was already a fortune. But I wouldn’t give in. Then the commander asked me if I could wait a little bit more, to which I said, “Wait? You are detaining me here for so many hours” , but he said that this was not the case, that they just wanted to buy the information from me. The last offer of ten million marks was made after the commander called Berlin and got authorization directly from Hitler’s office. But I would not give them any information.
At that point the commander was very angry and infuriated with me. He said, “Today I am offering you so much money and you don’t want our money. Well, one day you are going to repent badly. Today I am offering you this money, but one day I will give you this...” - and made a gesture passing his fingers across his neck, meaning that they would look for me to kill me, to cut my head off. Then they let me go and I went back home. But that was not the end of this event. I would soon hear from them again though..."
Riveting! We want more…
ReplyDeleteSure. Stay tuned... 👍🏾
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