Vojtěch Strauss

“Three families from Zvolenice u Prahy moved to us. There was a grandfather, father and son. Each of them took over one farm which had been left behind by the Germans. Pigs, cows, barns full of fodder, granaries above the houses full of grain, and a system wooden pipes ran through it and there was a crusher under it. It was for grinding fodder for pigs. Everything was furnished in a modern way. The cows had no troughs, but metal feeding devices were already fitted there. The farm was furnished with modern equipment. They took over it. Within three years they brought all farms to naught and when there was nothing left, they turned it into an agricultural cooperative.”

“My eldest uncle; I have not seen him alive, he was thirty-five and he had died before I was born. That was because they drafted men below the age of thirty. They arrived to him and questioned him how come that he was not doing anything. Men in leather coats arrived in a roofless car when he was cutting wood. Since he was a communist, somebody turned him in and they arrested him and took him away. Nobody knew about him. Only in the last year before the war ended, two guys from Slovakia arrived and he had been with the partisans and he had been shot to death. They brought us his ‘ausweis,’ something like an identity card, and a map. There were bullet holes in it. They gave it to us and they left. They did not say anything. Meaning that he had been buried there.”