“There I spoke to the interpreter. I asked whether I should bring something to the Gestapo chief so that they would release my husband. He considered it for a while and then said: ‘Perhaps the valenkas’. Do you know what these are? Felt boots. When they saw good felt boots they took it from people in the snow. They wanted them very much. They suffered a lot. When they went to service at night, they cut their blankets, wrapped their feet in it and this is how they walked on patrol. In the winter at night. So I returned back home to my father-in-law. I told him this and he replied that he didn’t have a new pair of felt boots. He brought some though. I took them to the Gestapo and asked when I should come next. They told me that I should come in a fortnight. So I returned in a fortnight. Meanwhile they took them all away. I returned and he said, ‘Sorry, it’s too late.’ I thought they took them somewhere. I asked whether they could tell me how long they would keep him in a labour camp. He didn’t answer. I didn’t understand then that they were dead.”
“When the war broke out I was pregnant for six months. I was summoned to the military administration. I told them I was in my sixth month of pregnancy and they replied, ‘Well, it doesn’t show’. I said to myself: ‘It doesn’t matter. You can go home and when you give birth, we’ll come for you.’ So I stayed home. But the feldshar and the nurse left and did not return, they were conscripted straightaway. This was the way it was. And I returned home. Then the war broke out. In a month I started seeing huge blazes on the horizon, there were fires. The newspapers said that our soldiers fought like lions, but the Germans kept advancing and our soldiers kept retreating.”
“Everything ended fine, we could go on but suddenly there came the news that Yasna Polyana was seized by the Germans. They avoided us. Us, our section they left alone. Before us there was Yasna Polyana and then Moscow. And there were Germans in Yasna Polyana. So we had to stay. And the Germans occupied us too. Suddenly nothing worked: water, electricity, stores, nothing worked. But there were large warehouses of corn in the area. Special large warehouses, well built with ventilation. So people opened them and everybody could take what they wanted. And people said that just two weeks before that Stalin sent to Hitler two trains of wheat, since they were still friends, in the last days. So people too what they wanted. And my husband took the corn too to provide for us with bread at least, since we had nothing else.”
Yevdokiya Kepková was born on March 28, 1922, in the village of Boliki, Smolensk region, Russia. Her family owned a large estate. It was confiscated during the collectivisation of the 1930s and she and her relatives had to go to work in a kolkhoz. She graduated of a medical school and became a midwife. She married at eighteen. Her husband worked as an agronomist in a kolkhoz and because of his injured arm he avoided conscription to the army. The area in which they lived was occupied by the German army. Her husband was shot by the soldiers and she was left alone with a small child. She worked for German soldiers as a nurse. When the Red Army drew near the hospital where she worked, she was persuaded by the German soldiers to leave with us. There were fears among the people that the Soviet Army would revenge on their compatriots who worked for the Germans. Through Italy she got to a POW camp in Augsburg, Germany. In this camp Germans selected prisoners and distributed them to various job positions. She was chosen by the mayor of Augsburg and sent to the local maternity hospital. She survived the air raids on the city, met a Czech citizen Josef Kepka who was on forced labour in Germany and together they fled to Czechia in the last days of the war. They settled in Nejdek, where she worked as a midwife. She died on November 24, 2024.
