Jarmila Gajová

"I have one more ugly memory of 1945 as a small child. I was walking home from school with my friends, there were three or four of us. And there was a big farmhouse with a big garden on the edge of the village, and there were maybe a hundred Germans sitting on the ditch, I don't know if they were prisoners of war. They were led by our so-called..., I don't know what they were engaged in, they were called hurrah partisans. They were leading them there as guards, I don't know where they were leading them, where they were leading them from, it was probably from the labour camp that was behind Kolvín, but I don't know. Being curious children, we stopped there, walking around and looking. They were having a rest there, because they probably couldn't go anymore, drinking water and eating bread. The guards were walking among them and guarding them, unfortunately they were Czechs. So we were standing there, watching, they were all stunned. One of the middle-aged Germans had his shirt unbuttoned and on his shirt there was a beautiful, big gold cross hanging around his neck. Then one of the guards who had been going around came and told us to go. He came up to him and ripped the cross off his neck by force, and the man got such a blow that he had a ten-centimeter bloody bubble by his nose. So that's one of my most horrible experiences."

"Once we came to the fence and there was a hairy, scruffy guy sitting there, he seemed horrible to us. So we started screaming and went to tell our parents. Our parents chased us away, it was one of the partisans. Dad went to see him afterwards, made a deal with him, sent him somewhere. I know that after that they brought him food to the hay barn and that my dad also gave him boots, back then they used to be given work boots, nowadays they call them canadas [combat boots, trans.], because he had nothing to walk in." - "Were they Czech partisans?" - "They were Russians. One day in the late afternoon they called Dad from the forestry administration in Padrť to come there immediately. So he left and he wasn´t coming back, wasn´t coming back. I know that it was evening, dark, my mother was praying, kneeling, crying, because she thought that they had caught the partisan and that he had revealed that he had the boots from my father. But it was a bit different, it was really a few days before the end. We had a beautiful Aero car, we used to sit in the boot as kids, if you know what the first Aero cars were like, I can't tell you the number. The Germans wanted both from the director, who had a little Tudor, and we had an Aero, to buy the cars, these high ranking officers, and they wanted to leave. In the end it ended up so that my dad came back and it was all right because they wanted to buy the cars and they didn't buy them in the end and I don't know how they got [away]."