Anna Malášková, roz. Pajerová

“When you were at least half German, you had certain privileges. You were a Volksdeutsche, right? So they told me that I could be a Volksdeutsche and I said no way. ‘Pajer, Pajer, isn’t that German? Deutsche Familienname?‘ But my name was by no means any Bayer. It had a Czech spelling, Pajer, and our father came from the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands.“

“During the execution, there were about seven soldiers in the firing squat. Some of them aimed at the heart and some of them at the head so the person died immediately. The convinced man (a Hungarian) went to the execution and when they tied him to the pole, he asked my husband to pray Lord’s Prayer with him. And my husband could not sleep that day and in the middle of the night he woke me up and said: ‘For as long as I will be a judge, I will never sentence anyone to death. God brings a man to this world and He has the right to call him back. I will never do that again.’”

“Volhynian Czechs were joining the army and my brother also did. I said: ‘I won’t go to the Czech army, I’ll go to the Polish one.’ My mother was Polish and I always felt like a Pole rather than like a Czech – I attended a Polish school and everything. My brother said: ‘No, I’m Czech and will go to the Czech army.’ I went with him to Rovno where they joined up. Rovno is a city now with about one hundred thousand inhabitants.”

“... they wanted to say goodbye to me. So I went to the Dworzec Gdański railway station and we could not even leave the city. It was late in the evening when we were leaving Warsaw. And it took us three days to do seventy kilometres. Three days! We would go on for a bit and then wait while they were bombing. The train got also hit so the commander told the passengers to get off. But there was nowhere to go. We got off in smaller and bigger groups and carried on east. We thought that it would be better there but in the end the east wasn’t really much better than the rest.”