Jaroslav Vávra

"That was back in '45. I didn't see the death march directly. They went from Postoloprty through the region of Lenešice and then again to Rana. They just passed through the region of Lenešice. We lived next to the cemetery, so as a boy I used to look over the wall at the morgue. I saw about five prisoners shot. The gravedigger was burying them there, still in his scratchy uniform. I saw him grab his coat and carry it in one hand. He buried about five of them. Supposedly, I heard, one got saved. He jumped into a ditch somewhere along the road. They were supposed to shoot eighteen of them near Postoloprty. There is a plaque at Bohosudovo that says that the death march went that way."

“When in the April 1945 the so-called death march also went through Lenešice. These were people who were locked up in a concentration camp, so they moved that camp from somewhere in Germany, and that camp went through Postoloprty, through Lenešice and turned up to Rana, and from there they got to Bohosudov. They passed through Lenešice here along Dlouhá Street, immediately turned around and immediately went across the track as on Rana. They only took a tip through Lenešice and then up again and came to Rana, and they were already in the Sudetes again, so they didn't stay long here, in Bohemia. I saw that here, supposedly here in Lenešice one of those prisoners escaped. He jumped into a ditch somewhere and crawled into the canal and so we saved his lives. Otherwise, I saw here, maybe five of those people were shot. So I saw, just because I was at that cemetery, so I was always curious, so I always looked over the wall, we were right away, I looked into the cemetery from the garden, so I saw how the gravedigger was burying them. He grabbed him by the ragged rags and carried the man in one hand.”

"We were simply assigned to the border area. It was the so-called Sudetenland that was taken, that territory, the Germans occupied the so-called Sudetenland. We were right on the border, Raná was already German, Břvany was already German, Sudetenland, Nečichy, what am I talking about, here Břvany, it was also Sudetenland, then here to Postoloprt, it was all Sudetenland, it was just that it didn't belong here anymore. We were Böhmen und Mähren, Bohemia and Moravia. So, that's how it was. And at that time, when it was being cleared out, these people who were like our people, Czech people, when they didn't want to so-called socialize, when they didn't want to sign the accessories to the Germans, they were deported to the so-called Bohemia. Therefore, the refugees were driven here, that was many people. Just as they are fleeing from Ukraine today, so back then they were fleeing from the border here to the Czech Republic. We still had very little of that space, but I remember that there was also a teacher there, and my dad sublet him too so that he would have a place to stay."