Libuše Fajkošová

"So we didn't have a thing. In the end, not even mentally... For instance that secretary and the party chairman woke us up one night, they started banging on the windows, they got in through the garden - and I heard this with my own ears: "You kulak, watch out, we can throw you out of here any time, or we can hang you from the closest tree." That’s what I heard.”

“Then when the English landed at Normandy, they hid - he and two or three Poles made an agreement, in a barn somewhere, and they joined the French partisans. Unfortunately, [the French] also didn’t have the means to get them to our army, which had formed meanwhile in England, so it took some time - they took them to London. There was a camp in London, and from the camp they were sent with the Czechoslovak army all the way to Dunkirk.”

“They even moved a family in there from Havířov, a homeless lot, and they made a nasty mess of it. We were afraid they’d tell on us. It was quite a young family, a miner he was, but they drank terribly, an alcoholic family. They didn’t do much work, and when Dad returned and they were still working there, they would make a fire for themselves in the barn and roast sausages. So [Dad] was afraid that if it burned down, they’d lock him up again. It wasn’t easy.”

“At first it was Poland, the Polish borders were at Lučina, and then the Germans claimed it right up to the River Odra. His father received a Volkslist, otherwise they would’ve had to abandon their farm and family, they didn’t know where to move to, so they took it. And that meant the seventeen-year-old boy [i.e. Josef Fajkoš] had to go and join the army. Dad’s relative was a doctor, and he gave [the boy] two milk injections which caused him to have high temperatures. When that happened a third time, the German conscription doctor said: ‘Enough, or you’ll all go.’ So my husband had to join the army, but that was an anabasis, but because his conscription was delayed, he didn’t have to go to the Eastern Front - because the fellow citizens who ended up like that, they never came back from Russia.”