Jiřina Hloušková

“Dad was dealing in coal and somebody turned him in. I still remember when the Germans stormed into Frenštát. Mom came home from the town. ´They imprisoned dad!´ I said: ´Christ Jesus, why?´ Mother replied: ´I don’t know.´ He was detained for a week and then they released him because they weren’t able prove anything to him. He came home and we continued working. Oh, how I remember those Germans! Whenever they came, we had to give them everything. They were coming to confiscate things. They were going from house to house and checking how much grain people had. They measured everything, assigned a portion to people, and the rest had to be surrendered to them. They came to us and we had a big nice painting of president Masaryk on the wall. A German entered the room and assessed how we were living there and then he looked around and asked if the man in the picture was ´Grossvater.´ Dad says yes, that was grandpa. But then Dad took off the painting immediately because if they had discovered that it was actually Masaryk, they would have shot him to death.”

“We suffered a lot. In Vítkovice, the shelter where people were hiding was buried under debris. I, my friend, and the foreman have saved ourselves, but all the other people from the workshop died there. A bomb fell there, and it buried everyone in that shelter. The air raids were usually around eleven o’clock, and at the beginning we liked that. If there was an air raid, we would get out and go out in the street, there were houses and a meadow and free space behind them. The air raid would take a while and we would sit down and watch the airplanes flying. Then all of a sudden those houses began to fall down! The guy who was delivering material to us got killed there, and I and one more friend ran into the shelter. At that time, those airplanes began bombing all of a sudden. That was for the first time. We were sitting under a fence and there was a shelter and so we ran there, but the guy stayed there and it killed him.”

“We were campaigning for the Unified Agricultural Cooperatives with Rosťa. We were visiting the village houses. Some people agreed with it, some did not, there were all kinds of people. We came to Hejda’s house. They were really poor, and there was even their grandma living with them, a poor woman, too. Rosťa explained it to them, what it would be like and what it involved. They were listening. As we were to leave, when he had already explained them everything, this old grandma knelt in front of Rosťa and said: ´Teacher, you are such a good man. Do not make my son get even poorer than he already is.´ I ran away. I told Rosťa that I would never go with him again and I would never do this again. He began explaining it to me, telling me that it would be fine. And it was. People in the cooperative were doing very well. This Mr. Hejda eventually worked as the cooperative’s chairman. He came to me and he even thanked me. As I said, it was a terribly difficult time.”