“When they accommodated the SS man in my aunt’s room downstairs, my dad would say: ‘Thank God that they sent the SS man here.’ He could not say a bad word against him; he was some university professor… On Christmas we received oranges and bananas from him… That was something unthinkable. It drives me crazy when I see today’s children walking from school and throwing oranges at each other and stepping on bananas. That’s incredible! I cannot even look at it, otherwise I would have to slap them. We didn’t have things like that. We had beet. When somebody mentions beet – well, I know that it tastes good, but I cannot eat it because we have been eating them throughout the entire war.”
“We were carrying it on our backs. I learnt about it only after the war. Every Sunday we were going on trips, either to Kosíř, or to Ptenský dvorek, or to Na Pohodlí. We had small rucksacks, and we carried some food and drinks and cups in them, but the messages were packed under them. Dad would always step away from the path, as if he needed to go to pee, and he would take the rucksacks from us and then bring them back empty.”
“Not a long ago I was in the Bruntál region, on Andělská Mountain. My granddaughters were in a summer camp there and so I went to visit them. I was standing there, looking at the forest and smiling. A gentleman in a gamekeeper’s uniform walked by and he remarked: ‘Madam, I have been watching you for a while, you keep walking, you are smiling and shaking your head.’ I said: ‘You know, it was me who planted those trees. I am just shaking my head when I see that the trees grow, because we had thought that they would never be able to grow.’ I am just so happy about it. It really was a beautiful forest.”
Alena Strnadová, née Brzicová, was born February 20, 1933 in Prostějov. Her father Vilém Brzica was gathering intelligence for the partisan group led by Josef Knoll during WWII. Alena unknowingly participated on the group‘s activities as well, when she was carrying food and medicines for the partisans in her backpack. After the war she studied at the Jiří Wolker Grammar School in Prostějov and when she graduated in 1951, she continued her studies at the Faculty of Medicine at Palacký University in Olomouc and later she transferred to Masaryk University in Brno. In 1957 she graduated and she moved to Kostelec na Hané, where she was working as a paediatrician until 1992. She still lives in Kostelec na Hané.
