Ing. Zdeněk Rerych

“Father was first sentenced to half a year but the prosecutor appealed against it, said it was too little and he got a year. We were never told officially the exact reason why he was arrested. But we had our suspicions. The Vlajka member was interested in the so-called human hunts that were happening after the war and he supported that, as the president of the national committee. But that was when my father was already against it. The Vlajka man knew that we could still have some guns at home and we did, we had them hidden in all kinds of places and they found them during a house search and so that was the reason why they arrested father.”

“When February 1948 came we, former partisans, were invited to join the KSČ based on Gottwald’s notice. We came to the interview for joining the party and guess who was the committee president… The man who was a Vlajka member during the war and that my father helped so he wouldn’t go to prison. Another committee member was a man who after the war could never forgive us that we had never told him about hiding partisans during the war. He felt like he was deprived of his little piece of fame. And now he was representing the KSČ. When my father saw that he said that he’d never be in the same party as those people and that we were going home. So we got up and left and that was just the beginning.”

“I went from the courtyard to the woodshed to pick up some logs and suddenly I saw a group of nine Germans coming. They were armed. I didn’t know what to do but I knew I couldn’t run and that I had to act like nothing was going on. So I went to get the log, I picked it up and slowly walked back to the house. I knew that there were three of those Russians sitting in the back room. I closed the door behind me and I said that the Germans were coming. I opened the window and all of them jumped out and ran off into the dense forest. Meanwhile mother went to meet the Germans. They were just entering the courtyard. Mother was asking them in German what they wanted and they said they were looking for partisans, escaped prisoners and such filth. My mother was asking with surprise what partisans were and that she saw no one like that around. She struck a conversation with them and offered them warm milk for breakfast that she just milked the cow… and they accepted.”