Jaroslav Šimánek

"They were moving a Hungarian transport train into Batelov and it was full of weapons. The guys gathered everything into wagons and took it to Velké lesy, that's here, as you go to Nová Ves, and there they hid it all and arrested the Hungarians. Then the SS train came from Jihlava, and at Na Kochánce, that's about a kilometre and a half before the station, towards Jihlava. My father went to meet them still with Mr. Kasis, and they happened to have rifles, but they threw the bullets out of the rifles. And they went to the Germans, and of course the SS picked them up and brought them to the square and decided that they were going to hang father. That's when I remember, Mrs. Bečvářová came to our window and she said: 'Šimánková, hurry up to the town, they are hanging your father.’ Fortunately, Blankenstein was locked up there in the town hall, and our people locked them up there. And when the Germans came, Blankenstein stepped out of the town hall, they let him go, and because my father worked in the castle, and so he and the count knew each other very well, he said: 'You mustn't hang him, otherwise he'll hang us all. We'll all die here.'"

"Teacher Neužil. He was the teacher who taught us at the town school. When Hitler came in 1939, he taught us Czech and geography. We had maps, he basically didn't allow us to strip the Sudetenland that Hitler took, we normally learned the whole republic as it was in the First Republic in the eighteenth year. I respected him immensely, he was a Czech, body and soul. And then we had a class teacher, I don't remember him anymore, the Gestapo took him right out of the classroom. And we watched from the window as they loaded him into the car, and the whole class cried."

"In 1935 we returned, my mother went home with me. And my father said he was going to close the business and sell it and he bought, he will have some machinery sent to Czechoslovakia, because the planing mill, the one behind the wall here, it's from 1932, it's still working. So, my mother and I went back, I didn't speak Czech, I only spoke French. What was interesting there was that when my parents wanted to argue, there they spoke Czech in French and I couldn't understand them. Then later, when I forgot to speak French, they spoke French among themselves and I didn't understand them again. So now I was on the train and my mother was teaching me Czech on the train."

"When I finished school, my father had the trade open, so I went to my dad's to learn for a year. I was with my dad for a year and the Germans came, the Germans were already here, and they closed my dad's trade, saying that he had to do forced labour in the Reich, in Germany. The son of the landlady, Mrs. Doležalová, was in the personnel department at the depot in Jihlava, so he sent father out to manage the wagons at the depot in Jihlava."