Milan Hlobílek

“I received a letter from my father, telling me not to go home because they would move us, but he wrote that he did not know yet where and when. About two weeks later I received another letter in which he wrote me where they had evicted them and where I was to come. I arrived from school to the Haluzice stop and my father was waiting for me there. We walked over the hill towards the house. It was in early spring and we started in late afternoon. We came to Jestřabice and father said that the distance to the house was now the same as what we had already covered. We continued walking and it was getting dark and we were almost in the forest. I asked where we lived and father said that we lived there. I asked why there was no light on, and father replied that it was because there was no electricity, only kerosene lamps. The room was about two steps under the terrain and it had a dirt floor and two small windows, a stove in the left corner and one three-part closet, a table and two chairs and two beds and a bench. I asked where I would sleep and why they had not brought my bed. As father was loading my bed onto the truck when they were being evicted, the official told him that he should not take the bed because they would take care of me. I thus slept on the bench and then I constructed a bed and filled it with straw. It was desperate.”

“The Germans left the farm at the end of the war and everything was looted. They took the tractors away, I don’t know where, they killed the livestock and they stole whatever they could. Then the war front stopped in the village for two weeks and somebody took the rest during that time. They simply stole everything. We lived opposite the church, and the front was passing from the direction of Milotice, and Germans made a machine gun nest at the church tower and Russians were shooting at it. Before they could take an aim, they broke all our apartments and they broke all the windows. We came back after the war and we repaired everything. It was a lot of work.”