Anežka Stránská

„They liked us a lot there and it was good there in a hospital. There was good work, but we didn’t go voting. So they cleared us. Why didn’t you vote? We didn’t go, as… First we went, those were the first elections, they said, it was our elections, Czech ones and there will be our people there and they are Czechs, so we voted for them. And then, as they behaved like that, we knew what was going on. They took the mother and sentenced her to ten years, so we didn’t believe them, so we didn’t go again. The hospital director came and begged us, sisters, please go for my family, please go and vote. So we said we´d go but we put there no votes, but normal pieces of paper. Well do as you like, but please go voting. So we marched in there at half past seven in the evening, fifty nuns went voting. And of course we put white and blue papers in our envelopes and they punished us for it. They said we should go to a kind of a senior home and it was a social care institution called Pod Doubravkou. It was a collecting camp of Germans to start with, they were about four hundred. Then they divided them and kept those who were all right. And put our people there, but from a hospital, who could not, or didn’t want to work, or those who could not get healed. Many people were dying there, so they placed us there. We were separated there, just us alone. As we didn’t vote, no priest could come to us, but they did anyway… One was a service man, more or less, he´d come to see us, an educated many, a Dominican, knew many languages and had a brother, a priest, and his sister came there, she had nowhere else to go. So that was good, so we has a small secret mass early in the morning, at five or so.“

„To deserve our food, they brought us to the field. We went collecting potatoes. Right in autumn, as they brought us here already in 1945, well it was after right war, so the younger ones, we went to the field collecting potatoes. And did similar work. And then some sisters could not work, so they were bringing onions from the Fruty here in Brno and we´d peel the layers off and pickle the small ones and garlic too. And we also helped them, the ones who could knit sweaters to Tuzex. Awfully small patterns, such slinky wool it was, a kimono, long sleeves, and we earned terribly low wages, so the sisters, who went to the field, were feeding us. It was very demanding, we worked from an early morning until eleven at night. And there was a deadline they gave us. It was quite a tyranny. They were reading us so that it didn’t feel that long. Even with the onions we actually preferred making the sweaters… those were sold for a lot of money later.“