Anna Šrotýřová

“They had agreed that more of them would go. My husband left quickly at night when he was on duty. We had agreed on a place where he would be waiting if something happened. I packed a few things in his rucksack for him, and I left early in the morning through the back door. Later I learnt that they had watched me at the front door. But perhaps in was only a feigned watch. I had to come back quickly in order to send the children off to school. My husband was waiting in the forest in front of one derelict cottage, and I went there to see him. When we parted, he told me that he would be waiting there for the others. But at noon my daughter came running from school and said: ´Mom, uncle Pepída is baking bread and policemen are watching him.´ What was I to do? I ran out, and I met one of the financial guards. He said: ´Mrs. Šrotýřová, nobody will go. There would be a big scandal in Kvilda if all of us left. You have to find Jenda and tell him that we are not going.´”

“They led the people to the border and then we didn’t hear anything of them anymore. None of them returned. We didn’t know how it was organized, nor what we were to do. When I was leaving, it was much easier for me, because my husband had already been in Germany for half a year. He already knew what to do. Americans came for us in a Jeep and they took us to Zwiesel. From there we went to an assembly camp near Munich for a so-called screening, which was a background check done by the FBI or what not. They inquired about every one of us. Whether the person was a communist or not, etc. We only passed through, but the others had to stay there and they were later sent to other places from there. There were Czechs, Poles, Hungarians... All of them were escaping, not just Czechs.”

“A financial guard inspector arrived in May. He told us that since we had children and one of our daughters was to begin school soon, and since there was no school in Knížecí Pláně, we would be transferred to Kvilda. On June 1, my husband therefore began working as a financial guard in Kvilda. There were no flats, because Germans were still living in Kvilda. American soldiers were still there, too. There was never any shooting. The Germans were never treated badly there. Since my husband had worked in the village administration office a bit, the inspector assigned him to work for the local administration office there. Everything went smoothly. Some of the Germans were social democrats, and therefore they didn’t have to leave. But they said: ´All of our friends are going, so what would we do here by ourselves?´ All of them thus left except one woman.”

“We had a pub there. It was a place near Zdíkov, there were about twenty-five houses there. Germans suddenly arrived in September. We had tap-room there, and when the Germans came, they insisted that they would lodge there. There was only me and my mom, and you can imagine that we were scared. But the officer told us not to be afraid, and ordered us not to sell them any beer. They spent the night in our tap-room. They came in the afternoon. At night, I and my mom were sleeping behind a locked door, but somebody knocked on the door. It was the officer again, and he announced to us that they had been ordered to move back. He said they had been supposed to stay near the forest, but they mistakenly advanced a bit further. Thus they left the very same night. They controlled the area of the forest, they constructed a post on the road, and they stayed there throughout the entire war.”

“My daughters had been here before. At that time everybody had to register in Prachatice. Zlatuška then told me that the official had told her that dad ought not to come here. Allegedly, there were also cases when somebody arrived here, but at the airport something struck him as suspicious, and so he returned to the plane and flew back. The people were still afraid. We went here in 1990, one year after the Velvet revolution. But my husband told me: ´When I was handing them the American passport, my hand was shaking.´”