Marie Bartoňová

“They (guerrilla –editor´s note) used to come to us, to our house. And they would always bash, bang-bang, on the wall. They had a certain sign (agreed sequence – editor´s note), that a boy from the mountains from guerrilla crawled there to fetch a bag full of food. As we lived in a side alley, away from the main road, mountain boys would come to ours. Even with a fever they crawled and then bang their sequence for my father on a wall or a ledge. He used to come out silently and I, despite being asleep most the time, I heard him handing something over to some of those boys.”

“Everything went silent, but then suddenly the gestapo rushed to our house in Štramberk. Now imagine a gestapo man came to our kitchen to my daddy and came over to the room. And as the logs were regularly washed and got bent and as he stepped on them they moved and he screamed to the others to rip the floor apart. They suspected guns being hidden in there. As I was a small girl, I began crying. And mummy grasped me and put her hand over my mouth so that they wouldn’t shoot us neither.”