Marie Zajíček

… the Russians caught us on the street near Vysoke Myto. I could not understand what had happened to us after that. For me each person is a human being no matter if they are Czechs, Germans or English. But the people there, the Czechs spit on us and threw stones at us. I could not understand what was happening. Why people were acting like that. And after that on the 9th of May on an afternoon at half past four they took us to an internment camp near Holice. It used to be a camp for sport before. We were sleeping on the ground there. There were a lot of different people, German soldiers and also ordinary people, women, children and men. We were all sleeping on the ground. In the night came the Russians, I can remember that we could not sleep at all, it was impossible because of the nerves, we were thinking about whatever could happen to us. They came and picked out the girls. One man came also to me and he shook me because he thought that I was asleep, but I wasn't. 'Come with me' he told me. 'But I don't have shoes' I replied. He left and brought me shoes. But after that I had enough courage to run away from him, I went to a little room where there were eight or ten soldiers. I excused myself and told them that a Russian had come to take me, but I would not go with him. He was standing there at the door. I started to speak Czech altough I didn't speak well because I couldn't pronounce the R properly and that is a serious mistake. But I told them that I wouldn't go with this Russian and they should rather shoot me right there and write to my parents in Bolatitz, I gave them the adress. And that was all. And after that the Russian left.

It was a terrible time after the war. Once I was summoned to the gendermarie. I went there and the first thing that happened to me when I entered the room was that I got a slap on my face. I don't know why I got it. I was never hit before, not even by my parents. They told me that we had been at a birthday party and we sang German songs there. But it wasn't even true. One backer had a son who was some years older than me. There were only children there at his birthday who went to the German school, maybe seven altogether. Somebody sang 'Barcelona, du allein', that was all. They had lied about us, they said that we had met and upheaved national socialism and such things.