Marie Prchalová

"Then the teams were already getting together, they were already, you know, putting it together like that. Dad didn't want to get into it...you know, before he helped himself to the cows and that and then to get out of it, he couldn't, so he stuck to it. But then, for example, we had to thresh, and because we weren’t aligned with the comrades—my father wasn’t—we could only thresh at night, only at night. My father also had a small farm, so he worked in the forest too, along with other men. And when they started pooling everything together and making it communal, one time they were in the forest, and a storm came. There was a small cabin there Schiller’s cabin, so they took shelter inside. And then lightning struck, and our father said, “Well, there’s already a communal threshing here.” He meant that the storm must have threshed some grain there. One of the comrades reported him, and fourteen days before Christmas, my father had to go to jail and spend fourteen days locked up just for saying there was already a communal threshing there.

"Schiller lived in the castle, it was his castle. He was a German too, but he was a good German. My parents had only cows, two cows, there was no big farm, a goat, a pig in a pigsty, chickens and other things like nothing. So then Schiller, when the war was... you know, my parents had to deliver, they had to deliver what was produced in the field, what was harvested, and if it wasn't, then Schiller delivered it for them. He was a good man, and he and my father were the same age, they went to school together, and when he was deported as a German after the war, he and my father still wrote to each other. As long as dad was alive, and then he died, this Mr. Schiller wrote to me."