Růžena Horáková

(Q: “What did the food stamps contain, what could you get for them?”) “Not much. They gave us artificial honey, margarine, no butter, no lard either. Only the small children had a ration of butter. Twenty decagrammes of vegetables a week, some bread - I don’t know how much, but I know we had three thin slices a day to begin with, and even less afterwards. Do you know what we did during the war? We drove to the fields outside of Vienna, we gathered ears and ground the grain in a poppy-seed grinder, and then we made pancakes of a sort. The bread crumbled, because they said it contained chestnuts - it contained all sorts of things. Or fruit, when it was the time for wild cherries, then hurrah off outside Vienna to pick them. Those wild cherries, that was a lot of work, we preserved them so that we at least had some jam. Or plums, we went to pick plums and we made plum jam. There wasn’t anything to put on the bread, so we used everything we could find.”

(Q: “How many of you were there?”) “Three boys and two girls.” (Q: “And how did you arrange it?”) “Those boys were the ones we knew, who went to dancing lessons with us, we went on trips together. So we arranged that the boys would take a two-litre bottle of liquor, they said: ‘We need to fortify ourselves for the journey.’ Of course, we didn’t dint it much, but the boys... They took us a bit of the way, and then stop, the train doesn’t go any further. Onwards over the borders by foot.” (Q: “They didn’t check documents in those days?”) “They did.” (Q: “That must have been dangerous.”) “Maybe - the train ended there, but they had the advantage that I spoke perfect German, so when someone spoke to us, I answered in German. So we always scraped through somehow. And there was another train leaving from our side, and this time the conductors helped hide us, they watched out for us and when necessary we switched wagons - and in this way I reached Pacov.”