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MAY 1945, PRAGUE
1945 Adolf Burg came to Prague one of the days when the Token Force, Kombinovaný oddil, of Lt. Colonel Alois Sitek, a Czechoslovak-British unit integrated in the 18th regiment, V. Corps of the 1st U.S. Army visited Prague for two days. In these days of May, Kombinovaný oddil was entering Prague, the convoy stood on Vaclavské námestí near the Národné Muzeum. The contact between Gen. Svoboda’s Czechoslovak Army Corps (former Czechoslovak Independent Brigade) to the combatants of the western Czechoslovak Brigade was small. But Adolf Burg did not care: from the west of the city he went over a bridge on the river Vltava via Staromestské námestskem to Vaclavské námestí to greet and contact the western Czechoslovak troops. He felt the beginning cold war but for him as a Jew the important events in these few days of May were the unification of antifascist powers and the victory over Nazism. He was an eyewitness when Alois Sítek went to see Ludvík Svoboda in Hotel Alcron very closed to Vaclavské námestí and when this Czechoslovak-American unit moved back to Plzen or Pribam because it had to leave to the western sector behind the demarcation line, ordered by the Red Army.
In 30th May 1945 he participated at the victory parade of the Czechoslovak Brigades of the Inter Allied Forces in Prague accompanied by the president of Czechoslovakia Eduard Benes. He was decorated with the Czechoslovak Military Order for Liberty Ceskoslovenský vojenský rád “Za svobodu”, the Czchoslovak War Cross Ceskoslovenský válecný kriz.
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On that day – on Staromestské námestskem - he recognized amoung his brigade-comrades three jewish acquaints and also in the CIABG (1st Czechoslovak Independent Armored Brigade of the British 22th Army of Colonel Alois Liska) facing one another one Jewish friend of his youth and prewar time of Berlin, for him it was unbelievable – immediate after the genocid on the Jews of Europe! Adolf Burg told always that the number of Jewish combatants in the Czechoslovak Brigades was very high.
In summer 1945 and in the next year Czechoslovakia was really an arising strong absolute independant state, according to the London protocol on the zones of occupation in Germany and the supplement of August 1945 Czechoslovak, Polish, Belgian, Luxembourgish and other Allied military should participate in Allied rule of Germany.
But Adolf Burg felt arising anti-democratic oppression in the Soviet sector of Czechoslovakia. For a time Svoboda’s combatants it was not allowed to enter the western sector and in that time there were a lot of Soviet controlled checkpoints. In one night he went through a field surrounded of fir trees over the demarcation line near Plzen into the western free sector, to his left the sun was rising, to his right the moon set down. There he was welcomed and integrated by CIABG military together with an American Jewish relief organization.
After that he travelled to Rumburk searching for relatives missing in the holocaust. |
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