"Our parents had him hidden in a barn. We children didn't know about him for a long time. He must have been hidden there for a long time. Why so long, I do not know. Eventually, it burst, maybe someone saw him and said it. Suddenly, they came for my dad and arrested him. And my mother had to move out and was not allowed to take anything but the furniture. She wanted to take at least a little pig, but they wouldn't let her."
"I was in the cinema and there a title appeared on the screen saying that I should come to the main gate, that I have a visitor. I came there, the State Security officers were waiting there and they picked me up to go with them. I was there with a boy, so I told him that I was going to see who came to see me. I didn't even take my purse, I said I'd be right back. The State Security officers claimed that they would only take me away for a while and that I would be able to watch the film. So, we went and a car was already standing by the big hotel next to the cinema. They told me to get on. My cousin and a friend were sitting in the car. I asked what they were doing there. The State Security officer shouted at me not to speak. I had no idea what was going on. We went to Uherské Hradiště. There they took me to a room where I had to undress, they gave me clothes, they took me to a cell, locked me up and it was done."
"As the sirens began to sound, we wanted to hide in a shelter. We had such an arched cellar where we had food and other things so we could sleep there. But you had to go through the garden and across the whole yard. They were already bombing, we wanted to go to the cellar, but my dad suddenly closed the door. We had to survive the bombing in such an entrance hall on the ground. Then we found out that four barracks from us, there the bomb exploded, it was burning everywhere. And when it all calmed down, we went to look outside. All the windows to the garden were broken and we found about four shrapnel in the doorway. If we went to that cellar, one of us could have died."
Mária Masařová, née Onderková, was born on June 28, 1936 in Skalica, western Slovakia. Her father had a tailor shop there. She accompanied her mother during the illegal crossing of the border from the then Slovak state to the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War. On the way back, they were detained by German soldiers. She experienced the liberation of Skalica in April 1945. During the fighting, she was hit in the leg by a bounced bullet. In 1948, the family moved to Dyjakovičky in the Znojmo region, where they acquired a farm after the expelled Germans. They had vineyards, fields and cattle. But the communists soon took everything from them and expelled them from the village. The reason was the arrest and imprisonment of her father for hiding a man who wanted to flee to Austria. A witness was arrested at the age of seventeen for a similar reason. She was falsely accused of helping her cousins get a plan of the armory in Slavičín, where she previously worked. The young men were also detained with documents on the run. They sentenced the witness, as a juvenile, to four and a half months in prison. After 1989, she received compensation of six thousand crowns from the state for a five-month stay in custody. Mária Masařová died on January 7, 2021.
