"The Germans first traveled from Bydžov to Městec. Barricades were built so that they could not flow quickly so as not to go to Prague. There were either logs on the roads, or when bridges were on the roads, they were blown up, and they had to go around it. We little kids, we were eight or nine years old, so we had to be home, but the bigger guys, the teenagers, were watching where he was stuck and leaving him. There was a leading defense. The Germans surrendered, so they caught them and drove them to Městec. There was such a refugee camp, where Prefa is, there were such wooden houses and there they were."
"The farmer went to the haystack in the winter, there were tracks in the snow towards the haystack. He didn't have straw at home, so he went to the farms to ask for straw, that he wouldn't go to the stack for a few days, that they would spend the winter there. One citizen then kept one in the apartment."
"I was in Střihov on August 1965. I was still farming privately. We carried the grains, it was already a collective farm, but my father and I farmed privately, we drove sheaves with a cart and the Russians went to the chapel from Skochovice. They were more like Mongol soldiers on old cars when they looked at them, as if they were from a museum. They had machine guns there, they were skewed. It was a convoy of about thirty vehicles that drove to Městec. We waited for them to cross. In about four days, more modern cars drove past. And the ancient ones traveled to Bydžov in the opposite direction."
František Spejchal was born on October 18, 1936 in Střihov near Městec Králové in the Nymburk region. Only a few kilometers from his home village, the paratroopers from Silver A landed in December 1941. According to memories of a local citizen, the paratroopers slept over. In 1944, he watched bomber raids on the Cologne refinery from a distance. At the end of the war, he witnessed the Germans fleeing the advancing Soviet army. The captured Germans were taken by Soviet soldiers to the nearby Městec Králové. The Russians camped in the local forests and stayed there until autumn of 1945. After graduating, František worked with his parents in agriculture. Even after the onset of communism in 1948, he managed to farm privately. However, he had to face constant inspections. He joined the unified agricultural cooperative only in 1973.
