Ladislava Loučková

“I did not take my final examination, because the teacher stopped me; I remember that it happened by the window in the school hallway. She told me that I was from a capitalist family and that I should not think that she would let me pass my final exam. I thought, oh well, I won’t pass the final exam, so what? But then she said that I would go to work on the construction of a railway line in Ostrava. There were people, who were not agreeable [to the communists], and who were thus picked to go to work on the ‘Youth Construction’ in northern Moravia. I didn’t want to go there at all. I was already dating my husband at that time, and so I went to see him and we agreed that we would have a baby, and I did not take my final school-leaving exam.”

“The Germans found out that the airplane crashed somewhere in the Peruc forests and the German army thus searched them. And at that time, it was at the end of April 1945, my mother’s schoolmate was hiding the airmen who had been shot down, but he was afraid. There is a village in the Peruc forests which is called Chrastín. He was afraid that the Germans would find them there and that he would then be executed. And so he brought them to us, to my mom. My parents hid them in that mill race in which my dog Rafíček swam away from the mill wheel. My dad made a kind of scaffolding there, and he placed some planks over it. And they were in there during the day, for about two or three weeks, and at night they were taking turns and going to sleep in bed in the small cottage that we had there.”