Marie Straková

"Before the war started, there was Emanuel Moravec, the Minister of Education. He had, as we had windows, a window opposite. He had two sons and they went to the military school in Moravská Třebová. He had these sons with two wives. One day they were with us and they called my sister, she was five years older. Dad was still alive and he said, 'Don't you even think of going to Moravec's villa!' Because he was a bitch to women. My sister was already nineteen years old and he kept calling her. Around the corner, there was a General Plaček and there was a staff captain, I don't remember his name. There were three guest rooms, so they used to stay there. And the Czech soldiers slept in the gym. Some schools don't even have a gym as big as it used to be there."

"There is a new castellan at the Stiassnys' villa now, and she started talking about Stiassna having an affair with another man so she could have a child. She couldn't have any with Alfred Stiassny. Then she slept with an uncle and they had Susan. The castellan told me about it on TV last year, and the girls who went to school with me asked me if it was true. I said I hadn't heard it, but that I didn't think it was true because Zuzka was born to the Stiassnys. Nobody knew this. Zuzka then wrote to us from California that when her mother died she was glad she found her diary and it said how the children were born at our house, at the driver's house, and Zuzka was alone. So she said, 'What could mom do. At least I was born to her.' And then Josefa Primova, who was cleaning the place, came in and said, 'Did you know that Stiassná had Zuzka with someone else? I said, 'Who would have told us?'"

"I think it was sometime in 1938, I don't know now if they were skiing in Austria or Switzerland. There they heard that Hitler was going to occupy the Sudetenland, so they came home that evening. They took what they could with them. They went to Austria and then on abroad. Then Zuzka wrote to us: 'You know where I am, I'm only in England'. And she said she was with Jana Baťová, that she needed to learn English. And when Hitler started bombing England, they took a steamer to America."