Jiří Pavlica

“There was this wooden house next to us, some Mrs. Šostíková lived there, she was an old lady, I used to go to hers for milk as a boy, she used to have a cow, it burned down, the house, and I went there to have a look. That was right after those Germans ran away or surrendered, I arrived and I found it, where the cowshed was, there was Mrs. Šostíková kneeling on all fours, she was so large, next to her the cow with a ruptured stomach, yellow suet [pouring out]…”

“My grandfather was deaf since World War I, he didn’t hear at all and he was under the impression that nothing was going on and maybe he sensed a vibration from a cannon or some tank and he went outside and some automatic gun or what got his arm, he had, I don’t know, twenty holes right here. So straight to the hospital, Zdeněk [presumably the witness’ brother] was trying to drag him there and they said: “Amputation is the only choice.” He didn’t want that so he died in that hospital in 1947, he’d been lying there for two years.”

“Only the revolution, the end, that was in Frýdek, but the five years of war or how many, I spent those at Bílý Kříž… And I had no friends on our side, only on the Slovak side because there was a road leading around our house and that was also the border – Kysuce hotel today, up there, the former Baron, so there the Germans had a border patrol station and they set up booths, later towards the end of the war they even built a wired fence four or five metres tall up to that rock down there… So I would always go to the boys… And some of them at the border, they patrolled mainly at Bílý Kříž, they were usually Austrians, from Vienna or so, who [hadn’t made it] to the front, older guys, not in the leading positions because I know those were tough, but the older guys they would always say: “Schoo, schoo, you not, you kan’t go zhere or boom boom at you!””