"My husband's parents dug a big hole in the garden together with the neighbours. And we had that as a cover. It was about four metres long and two metres high. They covered it with planks and piled grass clumps on top of it so it wouldn't be visible. And that's where we hid for about three nights. Those were the last days of the war. My husband's parents had a farm. In case we had to run away, they quickly killed one of the two pigs. Mother-in-law's brother was a butcher, so he killed it. They did the killing there under the threat of bombs. One piece of shrapnel fell into the neighbour's dunghill, so it all went flying, but otherwise, they didn't break anything. They were cooking it fast, making soup. They say you have to stir the soup continuously. Then we had to go to the shelter because there was already fighting on Předina. That was a hill about five kilometres away. There was a radio there, so there was fighting, so we had to go to the shelter. And because the soup was not stirred and it was already warm outside at the end of May, it turned sour. And that was a pity because the pig-killing soup used to be delicious."
"By then, I was about six months pregnant, and my husband and I were on holiday for a week in the summer. His brother was a brewer in Dymokury. You know, you couldn't go anywhere much during the war. He had an apartment there, so we could stay with him. So we changed our surroundings for a week. On the day we went home to Prostějov, it was here in Bohemia. He was a brewer in a brewery near Poděbrady, so there was a raid on the railway somewhere, and we had to go around via Hradec Králové to Olomouc. From Poděbrady. I was scared. We drove all night, and in the morning, we came home and were looking forward, especially me, as I was pregnant, to sleeping. We arrived at my mother's, we stayed at my mother's, had breakfast and went to bed. And the sirens started blaring. Mummy had gone to the country that day to get some groceries, so she wasn't in town, but she had her mummy at home, so we were with her. And when the sirens started going off, we went down to the basement to sit down. That was in Prostějov, and they threw a few bombs there. They fell behind the cemetery. They wanted to bomb the airport, it's behind the cemetery, but they missed, the bombs fell in the fields. So I remember this air raid. I was sitting there with my grandmother. She was sitting on a chair, and I was sitting on a stool next to her, and I put my head in my lap, all scared. My husband was curious, he went to see what was going on outside. Then he flew in, it banged somewhere close. We lived fairly close, as the crow flies, it wasn't far from the airport. So it shook, but they didn't break anything in town."
"My mother went to work, and my sister and I went to school. Food was foraged in the countryside. It reminds me of the film when Mrs Růžičková used to go to the country to buy food on the sly. So my mother also went one time, and they were pig-killing at some farmer's place somewhere, and they traded her lard in exchange for some textiles, back fat from a pig and stuff. Since they were searching [bags] on the train, she wrapped it around her body. And it was freezing, it was winter, so she got ill. Just like Mrs. Růžičková in the film. What was the name of the film? "The Train of Hope" or something like that? -
"The Train of Childhood and Hope." -
"Exactly. Mom also drove as they took it according to the reality of how it was. And it was so real. It wasn't a joke that they wanted to make a joke in the movie. That was the reality. That's the way Mommy smuggled the lard wound on her body, too. Well, we survived the war."
"We came to the school. The class professor told us that we would have a holy week and that our finals would begin. I had already graduated, and the professors had already announced it [the assassination of Heydrich] to us while we were still at school because we also went to listen to the others graduate. They told us that martial law had been declared and that we shouldn't gather outside. No more than two people should be together. Otherwise, it's a riot, and such groups will be shot."
- "And did it come to that?" -
"No, we were quite disciplined. And we were scared, too, so we listened to the professors. We were afraid for our own lives, we didn't want to take any risks."
Anna Cásková, née Janišová, was born on 8 September 1922 in Kojetín na Hané. She graduated from the Vyškov Gymnasium and graduated during the Heydrichiad when martial law was declared and assembly was banned under the threat of being shot. At the age of 21, she married František Cásek, with whom she had two daughters. During the Second World War, she experienced the Allied air raid on the Prostějov airfield and the largest tank battle at the end of the war at Klenovice. After the liberation, she witnessed the wild and organised expulsion of the German population from the border area. A few months after the end of the war, she moved with her family to Stará Role in the Karlovy Vary region, where František Cásek got an apartment and a job in the local porcelain factory. Since he refused to sign an application to join the Communist Party, he quit his job and began working as a woodcutter. Due to her husband‘s precarious employment and currency reform, the witness started working in 1953. First, she worked in a wholesale shop, then in a porcelain factory in Nová Role. At the time of filming in 2022, she lived in Karlovy Vary. Anna Cásková died on July 15, 2024.
