"We weren't hungry. Maybe the soldiers who were on the battlefront, them yes. But not us. We also cooked for the officers, not for the poor sods on the front."
"First my father went and my sister was supposed to go to Russia to work, but she didn't want to. So she decided herself to go to the army. Then one day my father came home and took me to the army aswell. Mother said she didn' want to stay at home by herself, so father sent a car for her one time, mther packed up the bare neccessities, and came to join us with my brother. Then we were all together. Mother and I cooked in the canteen, father was in the bakery, my brother helped the officers, he was two years younger than me."
"When the Germans murdered the Jews it was dreadful. My uncle took them to the execution. The whole week following he couldn't eat, after what he saw. They dug a pit, stripped them naked, and shot them. And the Jews begged someone to help them... There were a lot of good people among them. All the shops in Lucek belonged to Jews. We had lived in a Jewish house, those were good people too. But they died, they all died. Some fifteen kilometres from our place there was this field, they took them there and executed them. We knew about that."
"You can imagine, it was awful. We were seven kilometres from the front. Every time it advanced, we had to pack everything and move. It was like that, advancing all the time."
"We cooked everything. There was a lot of mutton, but they didn't like it much. Sometimes daddy found us a pig, in which case we had dumplings with sauerkraut and pork (traditional Czech dish - ed.). But mostly it was mutton, which didn't taste great. But it had to be eaten."
Anastázie Barteisová is a Czech born in Volyn. The Czechoslovak Army was the destination of first her father, then her sister, then of herself, and in the end even of her mother and youngest brother. She then worked with her mother in the officer‘s canteen. They used to always be some seven kilometres away from the battlefront, and when the front moved, they moved with it. In the May of 1945 she arrived in liberated Prague. Her family lived first in Žatec, later she was given a place in Southern Moravia, which she then lost. Her family had political problems, and Barteisová was herself in prison for a month during the Fifties. Barteisová brought up three children, she lived in Znojmo. She died in 2022.
