Emilie Suchá

"They then had to leave the country. Allegedly they were having fugitives sleeping over at their place, who wanted to cross the Iron Curtain but were captured by the border guard. They came for them in the evening – I still remember that as if it were today. I was helping out some acquaintance who was living next door to them. One of the employees came and said that the police are at the Kristl family. I recall that there was fog everywhere. Only in Churáňov, which is higher up the hill, there was no fog at all. And when they came to their home, his wife ran away straight from the stables, where she had been milking a cow. Her husband came to her there and said: 'they're coming for us and want to take us away, we have to run away right now. She ran away in the very clothes that she wore at home. Their son was returning from the hospital, he came to the house of my acquaintance where I was working. So I told him: 'Vláďo, don't go home, the criminal police is at your place and they want to take your parents away with them'. But he insisted that he wanted to see them once more and say goodbye to them. He ultimately managed to accompany them to the border. They walked together for all night and continued to Kvilda and then across the border."

"So then after we had arrived in the camp, they accommodated us in groups of 16 people on the barracks. These were tremendously long barracks. We came to the camp, it was six o'clock in the evening, we were food and sleep-deprived ... When we they had accommodated us, we said to ourselves: 'now at last, we'll finally eat and go to bed'. We were dumbfounded. Before we could even eat something, the alarm was sounded and we had to take cover in the anti-aircraft shelter where we stayed until five o'clock in the morning. Well, in the morning, I was so weak that I couldn't even stand on my feet. The girls who were capable of work had to get up at six o'clock in the morning and they were taken to the factory for work. The factory was behind the city and they made parts for airplanes there. I couldn't work so I stayed in the camp."

"My sister served in Prague. Her employers had some relatives in Bratislava. So they sent her there – she went there on a plane. She told them that if they would like to flee abroad, that there were some possibilities. So they somehow agreed. They came here for the night. On that day, they slept next door to the Pešlovi spouses – there was a little pub there called 'U Jiříčků'. They were supposed to cross the border at night. A German was waiting for them on the border ready to guide them in the crossing. But someone gave them away. My brother went with them, so me and my sister accompanied him for a little while. And in the morning, we learned that they had been caught. Not my brother but these people whom he was accompanying. There was this ardent police man in Zdíkov and he came to our house in the morning and said: 'look, you were accompanying your brother to the border yesterday. We've caught him and we know everything. Meanwhile, my sister had already gone back to Prague and I was at home with my parents. They wanted to take my father to the police station for an interrogation. I said: 'my father is not involved in this – he didn't even know about it. I'll go instead of him'. They also went to Prague for my sister – they even put her into custody for two days. She told them that we just went for a walks with our brother, said goodbye to him and didn't know anything else. They came for me in the evening and took me to the police station in Stachy where they interrogated me. I told them: 'look, if you had a brother, I think that you would go with him as well, right?' So they let me go again on that evening and I told them: 'Do you think that I'll go back to Churáňov on foot?' It takes two hours from Stachy. So they brought me back home and that was it – nothing more happened. They released my sister as well. And my brother managed to run away. After some time, we received a letter from Italy where he wrote that he became the servant of some lord. He wrote that he was better off there than he had been on Christmas here."

"After the upheaval, my aunt who had a pub housed some Americans and among them there was one who spoke Czech. His name was gamekeeper. We lived very well then! They would give us so much chewing gum and chocolate! In the evening, they asked us to come to their place. But they were polite. They gave us some cigarettes. We would light a cigarette but then extinguish it right away and put it in our pocket. In this way we would bring our father a lot of cigarettes. When they went to some dancing somewhere, they came to my father and asked him if he would let us go with them, that they would accompany us back home after the dancing. So we would go with them. It was nice. Then there were also some Russians appearing there because it was close to the line of demarcation. And the Russians ran away because they weren't treated well there. So they came to Churáňov to see the gamekeeper. Among them, there were also Frenchmen, but others as well."

"So I waited a day or two ... it came on the third day. But no papers, nothing. Just: 'take a train, you're going home'. No money, no ticket ... So we went to the train station. There was a bunker down there, everything was under the ground. The loudspeakers were announcing the destinations of the individual trains. I said: 'but how do we find our train?' We didn't understand the announcements. It was a train station where you couldn't even see the end of it across the tracks. We ran into some Russians there with whom we could speak a little bit and they told us where to find the train to Prague. So we waited all day and all night, and the next day we went to the place where it should be. This station was a kind of an arch and glass train station, but everything was broken. Only at both of its sides, they made fires in stoves, so we could warm us up a little bit. When the train had arrived and after we boarded it, the train conductor came and asked for our papers. I said: 'look, we don't have any papers. We were brought here as a donation to the Reich, we didn't get any papers, no money, nothing'. So we went to Prague for free."