Vladimír Dušek

"I saw the Nazis gathering all people in trucks in order to transport them from Ležáky. As they were setting the houses on fire, local people had to put back all things they wanted to bring with them and let them burn in their homes. All the houses were set ablaze while the people were watching it. We came to see the very end of it, when everybody was leaving. How many soldiers were there? I think that at least two hundred. And there were around thirty women, thirty men and ten children. Several army trucks arrived and took all these people to Pardubice. And there, they were shot dead and their bodies cremated in the crematorium. Some of the children were saved and sent to Poland, together with those from Lidice; but those who were already around 14 or 15 years old were shot as well. They spared some of the women to take care of the children, but besides those, all of them were shot too. You can still find the pillars in Zámeček in Pardubice, to which they were tied and shot. Five people were shooting at each person!"

"We got there over the stream by walking uphill through the forest until we came to that side of the hill where there were many huge stones and some small trees were growing around. We lay down so that nobody would see us. It was around half past six, half past seven, because the few cows from the village had been already taken to the nearby village of Dachov. In that moment we started to be a little afraid that they might catch us and take us with the rest as they were sending away the rest of the women and the youth from the center of the village. But Mirek, my classmate, was very brave. And as we were lying there, barefoot and just in shorts, it was getting dark. It was already past eight o’clock. And then we heard some orders, which we understood because we learnt German in school during the war – they were calling for the SS men to prepare to leave, load everybody and get them to Pardubice. So they left and as we were in a good position to see the road, we thought it might be good. And it was. They took off and left nobody behind except for someone on the road leading to Dřeveš. We waited for half an hour and then followed the same way we came, going over the stream and the villages of Dubová and Miřetice until we came home at ten o’clock."

"I would say that what we had to give to the Nazis and to the communists was about the same amount. But it depended; it was different from village to village. In our village, nobody was displaced, things like that didn’t happen. My dad was getting along well with those people. He was the biggest farmer in the village. And in the beginning, you could hear people saying that he should move out. But nobody dared to do anything as everybody owed something to my dad. And the Vacha family was the same case. We were simply a modest, hardworking family."

[Did you know the Germans in the village personally?] "We had no Germans in the village, they were only passing through. There was a pub, where they were asking for some kind of help such as bread and things like that all the time – even before the end of the war, even some three years prior to the end of the war. The owner of this pub spoke German fluently, but people could listen to the foreign radio in his establishment! But when the Germans left, he had to go into hiding as there were some crazy people who wanted to kill him. So you could go to his place and listen to the prohibited radio and now they said that he was with the Germans! But he managed to escape – he jumped over a billiard table and ran to his neighbour’s barn, where he hid himself in hay. My uncle was the mayor in a neighbouring village and when he heard about this, he came and settled the issue. He said that it was nonsense. The man who wanted to lynch the pub owner was a neighbour of ours, who himself had had been going along with the Germans to collect our harvest! And a man named Strnad, a Czech from the Gestapo from Chrudim, was going there too, and he would always say: it is better to have things prepared for me than to let me take them! After the war, he was sentenced to ten years. And this neighbour of ours had been going with the Gestapo men and then he wanted to kill the pub owner!"

"Mr. Bureš told my dad: Yesterday, young Čech and Hrdý were at my place. And in the morning, I told them to catch the first train and get back in Dresden, from where they had escaped from forced labor. They minded his advice and thus they saved themselves. After the war, Čech married in Miřetice and Hrdý in Mlýnsko or in Skuč. So they were saved from being shot by listening to his advice and returning."