Růžena Válková

“I remember that I went to the railway station to get my monthly student pass. There is now a guesthouse there instead of the station. I came there and the Ortsleiter was behind the counter. I greeted him: ‘Grüss Gott,’ that’s a German greeting meaning glory be to God, but it doesn’t sound quite like that in Czech. He scolded me: ‘Don’t you know the proper greeting?’ He flung out his arm: ‘Heil Hitler!’ He flung out his arm so rapidly that it startled me. Then I returned home crying and I told mom about it. She told me: ‘I will deal with him.’ She told him off: ‘You will not teach my daughter how to greet you.’ I remember that they argued. He had to pass by our house on his way from work. Or I also remember that we were forbidden to ride a merry-go-round. It was in Žleby, by the Saint Anne church. There were always swings and merry-go-rounds, but only for children, nothing too much. The Ortsleiter was there and he said that we were socialist children, I don’t know how exactly he said it, but it was because my mom was a social democrat. He did not let us be and we eventually had to get down from the merry-go-round. We didn’t know why and we didn’t understand it, because I was six years old. But I remember that my mom argued with him there.”

“They evicted us from our house, and we thus spent one or two nights sleeping on hay in the hayloft. The hayloft is still there. We had one cow there and later they gave us some storage space for our goods. But there were not many goods during the war. They cleared the space for us and we lived there for three months. Fortunately we were able to move the stove there, and we thus had heating there, and we moved our beds and dishes there. They stayed in our house and they took over the whole house. There were two rooms upstairs, and another room and the kitchen downstairs.”

“While I was in the convent school, mom then wrote me a letter that people from the whole village had been evicted. She wrote me to the convent. I was not able to understand why. Only when I arrived home, mom told me that suddenly they received an order that all people had to leave. But the deportations to Germany have already stopped, and therefore they sent all of them inland to work for Czech farmers. Then there was the year 1948 and the government confiscated a lot from the farmers, and the Germans were thus relocated to the Ore Mountains. There were empty houses which had been abandoned by the Germans who had been deported. There were factories and there was nobody to work in them, and they were therefore relocated there from Stožec. They moved them from one German village to another. The region was entirely German. Our aunt was there too. My cousin had been in Germany doing forced labour, and she married there and she remained there. But her two sisters and my aunt and uncle lived in the Ore Mountains. Uncle even worked in uranium mines, and he earned a lot of money there. One cousin was working on pickling fish and the other was making threads. There were beautiful houses there, and they – Germans – bought them again. Funny, isn’t it? They had been evicted from the Šumava Mountains and sent to the Ore Mountains. To Kovářská, Vejprty, and places like that.”

“In Stožec there was a camp with Russian prisoners of war. It was surrounded by barbwire and when they went to the forest to work, they were watched by wardens. The regime there was strict. They were getting less food, and in general they had very little to eat. Mom would always secretly give them some bread when they walked by our house up to the forest. She would already know which German warden would guard them, and he would always turn around and pretend that he didn’t see anything, and she had the bread cut into small pieces and all the prisoners got some. I remember that Ortsleiter came to her one day and warned her that if she continued with this, he would have her imprisoned. Somebody had to inform upon her. The place which now serves as the information centre housed French prisoners from France. They were allowed to walk freely in Stožec, there was no barbwire and they could lead a normal life there.”

“The main reason why they imprisoned mom, as I remember from what she told me about what really happened, was that ammunition was allegedly stored in our house. In our house. You don’t remember it, but when I was a child, I remember that there were little wooden boxes with a red strip around them, and margarine was stored in them. The margarine brand name was Ceres at that time, and it was 100% fat. They accused us of hiding weapons in those boxes, and they came to our house and they broke the floor apart. The Germans smashed all the boxes and they imprisoned mom and accused her that she was the leader of the operation, because she could speak Czech.”