Josef Bílek

“Members of many different units of the army were walking there and I remember the way the captured Germans were walking, they had to keep hands over their heads, they were frowning... And they were barefoot - the Russians had taken their shoes and they had to be barefoot. And it was just a gravel road back then, there were stones and they were walking on those stones. And there was a little Russian girl with a machine gun, the machine gun was bigger than she was and when a German did not hold his hand up in the right position, she poked him like this [with the barrel of the machine gun to the ribs] and he jumped up and put his hands up. And she kept running around them like a satellite. And there were several hundred of them... It was so quiet, at first it was such a roar, and then everything got quiet, and I looked at what was going on, and the Germans... And they were such burly guys, and they were walking - without belts and shoes off, barefoot, and they had to have hands like this [above their heads] ... Oh, the way they were treating them, the Russians... They must have sent them to Russia afterwards to work somewhere in a gulag. “

“The Germans lost their way and got there... A German platoon lost their way there and they wanted to go to the barracks in Vlašim and stopped at the mayor´s (house). The mayor took them somewhere, they accommodated them somewhere, and gave them something to eat. And it had rained so they helped them get dry. And it was not a good thing what he did because one of them managed to run away from the barn and he reported at the headquarters in Vlašim that partisans were there and that they had been captured and so they (German soldiers – trans.) set out there on 7 May. It might have been on 8 May in the morning, it was four o´clock. They went there with a Hanomag, and they had a heavy machine gun mounted onto a platform. And so they set off there and had the order to arrest forty men from the village and shoot them (facing the wall). There was a road near the mayor´s. There is a memorial... They established it there, it is still there. And they made them face the wall and they wanted to shoot them, I mean those forty men. And they also wanted to burn the place down, just like Lidice. And fortunately, teacher Hauser who could speak German was there and he spoke to the officer. That there were no partisans. They thought that... there were partisans there. - ‘After all, we gave your soldiers food and we helped them get dry. There are no partisans here.‘ He was persuaded and they [the men from the village] had to go to Vlašim in front of the machine gun, hands behind their heads...”