Jan Märtl

"I remember as a little boy, at some point in 1957, some plan to liquidate those uninhabited houses started to form. It was probably some kind of political decision. It was also being said that the houses were potential hiding places for various agents. That’s how it was being explained. It was all the kind of talk of the time. I remember in 1957 the military trucks came and the soldiers jumped out and started putting together these big black Bakelite-like oval boxes or whatever you would call them. They were some sort of mines used in the army. I don't know if they were to be used against tanks, but they were big, they weren't mines used against people. I'm not an expert, I didn’t do military service, but that's what I saw. I know the explosive was yellow. And they piled up entire pyramids of these mines, and a soldier was guarding them. There was a Bakelite lid, with a rubber seal around it, a kind of hardened rubber. And the little soldier who was guarding it, to prevent himself from getting bored, would take a pickaxe, which he would stick into the ground, and we, the children, threw the rubber rings at the handle. Sometimes, they would somehow forget about these soldiers when it came to food, it was not very well organized. I remember we would bring them bread with lard and onions from home and then they would become our even better friends. It turned out that they gradually distributed the mines among the uninhabited houses in the village. They told us to open our windows so that the explosion would not break the glass, and then the soldiers blew up the houses one by one. I can still see those houses in front of me, as they were, complete, with a roof and beams. There was a bang, the house rose, the beams flew through the air like matches, then it fell, the dust settled and that's how it remained. They put several mines in houses that were further away from the village - apparently they had an excess of mines and somehow needed to get rid of them. Then the blows were even bigger and the houses flew even higher. After they would stay like that for years. Nothing happened there. They wouldn’t have dreamt of coming with bulldozers and create parks. All the rubble remained there for years. People would take the top beams to use for heating, or they would takes bits as building material. If a brick was found, it was cleaned and used. So the village de facto disappeared, the village green disappeared, just individual houses remained.”