Irena Valášková

"They suffered from periostitis and one shot off his fingers. My mother said that they were poor things, so we took them in. They took shelter in the henhouse, where they were in the daytime, and spent the nights on the hay worse. If anything, they would have fled. Across the road was a school and the Germans were staying in there. Now, where should we put the dirt from the bunker? We put it under the trees and into the manure and the people asked, how come we had so much manure. We said that we have a goat. They poked into it and knew that there is clay. So we answered that we planted trees. So it finally all turned out well.”

“Once we were in Postřelmov. I don’t know what were those people called. They gave us a rifle. But how to carry it? The two of us went together. We put the rifle in our pants; back then we wore the kind of loose sports trousers. On our way we met the policemen and they asked us, what we were doing there at night. We said it was only getting dark and our bike had a puncture. As we saw them, we let the air out of the bike and went on foot. But how do you want to walk with a rifle in your trousers? So then we laid it across the bike.”