Jindřich Hořenín

“Then there were rumours that three or four more villages were also on the list of villages which were to be burnt down by the Germans. Our village was included in that list. My father immediately dug a hole under the window from our room, which was to serve as a shelter, and he covered it so that it would not be visible, and we planned that we would jump out from that window, run to the stable and then from the stable run through the hallway into this shelter. But I don’t know how it would have worked if it had really happened.”

“There were three Germans in our house, they slept there. Of course they slept inside the house, otherwise they could have even have us evicted from our home. One of them was a Sudetenland German, and he spoke perfect Czech. And then there were two others who were Germans through and through. The German from Sudetenland kept talking about how Hitler had not started the war and that it was all because of Beneš. When he left, one of those other Germans who noticed that my dad could speak German warned him: ‘Look, watch out for him, he is enough of a bastard, and if you said something, he could inform upon you.’ And this was a pureblooded German who said this to my dad!”