"I thought I'd go back to my friend's if she went to church. We lived by the road in Mrs. Durchan's house at the time. Before I left, I washed my head and made ma hair… How could you afford to visit a barber then? And I run there a short distance down the road, it wasn't far. The bus to Chudenice and Staňkov stopped at their cottage, so I ran to that friend, I stayed there for a while, and when I went out again, I heard such a rumble, everything was shaking, roads, barracks. So I waited and suddenly I saw the tanks coming out from below, in the direction from Klatovy. There were submachine guns and American flags. I ran back to the kitchen and shouted, 'The Americans are here!' So they all ran out of the cottage, but we weren't sure for a while. That is, the night the Americans arrived, the Germans were still there, preparing to be deported to retreat at night. And the Americans arrived in the morning, it could have been eight or nine o'clock, not later. What a havoc! The tanks drove slowly, the boys waved to us, stopped in front of the house. You can't imagine that. The whole Poleň met at that tank. My mom had a brewed beer in the cellar, we had baked buns, we brought everything to the tanks there. What a joy! Well, they weren't there for a long time, then they went on right away. But they took everything we gave them."
"I still remember when we went to school, my parents got certain messages, because there was someone in the Klatovy team who had a brother in Polen. It was the Kalins. And he always announced that the Germans would come to Polena to search the attics. So that people can harvest it and leave nothing there. That they have spikes and that they prick there. And when our parents told us, we were so well-behaved that we shouldn't tell anyone about it and not even go to that house. So we always went to a grandmother who already had the children out of the house, it was Aunt Rubášová, we survived it with her. And she was quite old, and whenever it was ugly in the winter, she took our clothes off and threw us in such a large fluffy duvet, and we survived there until the Ghost of those Gestapo was over. And it was said that somewhere they took the bayonets and split the door. But this did not happen in Polen, it used to be elsewhere in the area. They wanted everything for the soldiers. That they served in the front and had nothing to eat. That we had to give them everything, even milk. How many times did they leave nothing at all to the farmers and took it all away for free."
Marie Soběhartová, née Hlaváčová, was born on July 14, 1929 in Březová near Uherské Hradiště. She was the eldest of five children. The family soon moved to the Klatovy region. An extraordinary experience for Maria was the arrival of American soldiers in Chudenice in May 1945. After the war, the family moved to Hradišťany near Stod on the West Bohemian border, but Marie soon returned to Chudenice. In 1949, she married Alois Soběhart. The witness recalls the difficulties of going abroad on holiday, in 1968 the family managed to travel to Split in what was then Yugoslavia. They also visited Vienna briefly. Marie Soběhartová worked in the production cooperative Tvar, later in the leather factory Kozak Klatovy. In the 1970s and 1980s, she and her husband ran a cruise restaurant in Bolfánek in Chudenice. The witness was widowed in 1989, and in 2018 she moved to a home for the elderly. Marie Soběhartová died on September 14th, 2022.
