Jiřina Kroutilová

"And before the war was over, they came to us - in Siberia, in Russia, there was terrible hunger. There was just - there people had nothing to eat, the Russian army was fighting I don't know where in the west, and people were going to Volhynia to beg bread, yeah. I remember that, they came to the kitchen and they said, 'Paže podaritě kusok chleba.' Terrible, that's absolutely heartbreaking. And you couldn't give them any more, just that piece of bread, because in a while we wouldn't have anything to eat ourselves. And when we - they could sleep in these families too - so we would go to the bedroom in the evening, and in the kitchen we would bring a batch of straw, and the straw would be spread out on the floor, and that's where the beggars who had come from that deep Russia to beg slept, and they had a bag of bread, which they - they got a piece of bread everywhere - and they dried it on the stove in the families where they spent the night, so that it wouldn't rot, and then they were taking it home to Russia, thousands of miles away, a dry rucksack - you know what the Russian people suffered, nobody can imagine. And then they went home with a rucksack full of dry bread so that their children wouldn't starve to death."