Alois Hirnich

"One of them died on the western front and the other one was doing training in Gliwice in Poland, and then, when he was sent to the front, he has not even reached it. He probably died somewhere on the way... He was drafted in Poland in 1943. He spent a year there, then they sent him to the front and that was it. Missing. Nobody knows what had happened with him."

"The received the notification some three weeks beforehand. They had to go to the train station, and then there were others who went three months later. If I remember correctly, in Vrbno it happened three times. They were all gone before Christmas." Interviewer: "As a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy, what did you think about it?" A. H.: "We were still stupid boys. We had been told that we would follow them in February or March, and go as a group of all the miners. They said we had to stay there by that time. And I am still here, even now."

"We were feeding the goats left behind by the Germans. We felt sorry for them. The goats were bleating. Cows had been taken away. I don’t know who took them. They slaughtered them somewhere, but I don’t know where. Everything was a total mess at that time. The goats were bleating and so a friend of mine and I – the friend's family had also remained there, but then they moved away in 1950 – put them into a barn and began feeding them. We had enough hay, because the Germans had prepared it. They didn’t know that they would be ordered to leave. And so we were feeding the goats, giving them water, and so on. Later, we were even paid for it. There was a pastoral cooperative, and they were paying us for it. We had some twenty or twenty-five goats. We were feeding them, but then they took them away from us and we had nothing to do. We applied for work in the forest, and thus we began planting trees and things like that and that's how we spent the time."