Věra Smilková

“We children didn’t realise a lot of things. Our parents didn’t tell us about everything until after the war. We were children, we didn’t even care. Except we did care when Dad went out in the night. Mum would always pray. She’d say: ‘Oh gracious me, will our dad come back? Oh, who knows.’ If he would be stopped somewhere by Germans and if they saw what he was carrying, then what? They didn’t give no quarter for that, did they?”

“During the war we had to give up a pig. One whole live pig and then five kilos of lard from our slaughter. You had to give all of that ahead of time, and then you could have your slaughter. Well, and my parents always kept one extra pig in secret. And the mayor, the chairman, whenever they came to check on things (on hens and cattle too, it all had to reported, right), he always gave the farmers in the glades a heads up that there was an inspection coming. So they could prepare for it. So they could hide whatever stuff they kept illegally. [Q: And where did you hide it? Do you remember?] All kinds of places. We’d take it up into the hills (the forest). We’d stick the hens into sacks, and Dad even had a kind of cage for when we had a smaller piglet. There was a pit there, where we threw all kinds of things, tins and the like - we called it ‘hať’. So Dad would have it all made up already, and all we had to do was bring the pig in the cage. The hens as well. We’d chuck them into a sack and then hide them among the weeds. We’d give the pig some milk to drink to keep it quiet. Oh, we did all kinds of things...”