Ludmila Petrová

"Oh yeah, we were in the basement and everything. You know what was going on, we were so scared. All I remember is that it was on a Saturday when there was, it was in Prague on the fifth and that's when the train was there and we were all scared too. And then on Wednesday the first tanks and cars with Russian soldiers came here. That's when we stood on the... the lilac was blooming early then, we stood there on the town and we waved at them with those lilacs. Then everybody was around the church, they had these wagons and cars and horses and everything."

"Dad was a gendarme and one evening he came home from duty and said: 'Start packing' - I was six years old, I was in the first grade, seven - 'start packing, a truck will come here' - there weren't many of those moving trucks in those days - 'and we have to get out of here.' There was a station, there was a train, in Old Bohumin, there was no train. And we were three children, the fourth one was born after the war, later. And in that year 1939, my mother took a passenger train with us, with us three children, and behind us in the freight car were these things - and they moved... we came here to Luka and we had nowhere to put it, so at some Kremráčeks next door, there was a bakery and they had two rooms available, so they let us put the furniture there. That's the situation we had. In that... I think it was 1938."

"Here, sometime in the early twentieth century, the Countess had a nursery built, which was not called a kindergarten, but where the children went, and there were nurses who were in the Order of St. Hedwig as substitute teachers. And the Countess brought them here. And it was the Widmann family that financed the running of the nursery. And the Countess would go there once a year at the end of the school year and after Christmas, and we would always kiss her hand and she would give us a present and we had to, like, say a poem or a prayer or something. And I'm going to show you a photograph here of the Countess sitting amongst these children. The children went there from the age of three to the age of six, and they learned all kinds of things."