Julie Košťálová

“When we moved to Frýdlant, they had to tow the moving van up with a caterpillar. They moved us by caterpillar. Across the garden, which was ruined. They worked there day and night. Say at two in the night, a horn would blare and there’d be stones falling on the roof. Stones this big, really.”

“When we came home, my father had to sit on the bed, he held my sister on his lap, I sat right beside him. There was a table near the bed, and they stood a sub-machine gun on it on a kind of tripod and aimed it at us. We weren’t allowed to budge even an inch, and they took out everything they could. It’s one horrible memory, which was in my dreams for a long time. Mum had her pony tail cut, a beautiful long pony tail. When she had that done, my father didn’t say a word and just went away in silence. She had her hair permed. They did that with electricity, with a kind of clamp. She had her pony tail wrapped up in newspaper down at the bottom of the wardrobe. So all her hair was strewn around the floor. As they took everything out of the wardrobe, all the things, everything was on the floor. They took all the clothes, the bedding, they only left us what we wearing at the time. Not even a duvet or a pillow... They left us nothing at all, really. The cottage was full of them. It was such a torrent of men streaming out of the forest.”

“The family was broken up by it, actually. Because the Liters, the old woman downhill, the Dudeks next door, then the Stýskals, then the path maker. Those were all family, those were all acquaintances. And then everyone was somewhere else. So it dell apart. And there were no more gatherings at the old woman’s [house] or at Auntie Maruška’s at the Minarčíks... And now they’re all dead, in fact, so...”

“I already had my second boy, a baby, he was born in November. So I had to take those two children and leave. You had to open the windows, put out the fire, open the door. We couldn’t leave anything locked, and we had to go all the way down to where the dam is today. A bit further than that, even. We stood there on the road and waited for it to explode. When it did, when they signalled it, we could go home. When I came home, there was a pile of dirt and stones in my living room, the windows were dirty, and all the rooms had disjointed corners. In the living room, which faced the quarry directly, you could actually place your hand into the chinks.”