Miroslav Lebduška

"My dad helped my uncle, my mom's youngest brother, towards the end of the forties, in 1949. He took him across the border in Most, which had not yet been wired. He lived in Olešnice. His name was the same as my grandfather, Antonín Stonjek. Since he was the only boy in the family, he must have been named after my grandfather. He worked in the forests for the forester as an adjutant. In 1967, my uncle came to us and told me why he had emigrated. He had a friend, Dalibor Ksandr, who suddenly ran away. It was that the gamekeeper, a German, I don't know his name, hid Russian prisoners who had escaped from captivity during the war. After the war, they left. Well, then the Russians came to my then eighteen-year-old uncle to see if he would take them to the gamekeeper, that they wanted to thank him. He led them there and they shot the gamekeeper. He [gamekeeper] had sons abroad who threatened my uncle that they would deal with him if he betrayed my father, which he had not the slightest intention of doing. So [the uncle] packed up and emigrated. When he was in a refugee camp in Austria, he met his friend Dalibor Ksander there. Then the story went around that they emigrated together, but they didn't tell each other, and it was only there that they met."

"When the Russians drove past the People's House or the National House in Hostinné, they drove through the intersection with people standing around it. Russian tanks and trucks were coming from Náchod. Everyone was shouting at them to get off the tank and go back home. They turned the signs around so they wouldn't miss, and sometimes they wrote on them how many kilometers away Moscow was. And as I was looking at it, I said, 'How about we stand on the other side?' As soon as I finished, everybody stood on the other side. They actually went the other way, and they got to Čermné, where there are serpentines and a narrow road. They couldn't turn around there with the tanks, they were hiking the cars all night and then coming back."