“The men were sent to Poland and from there to Russia. They were behind the war front all the time. They were assigned to the organization Todt. I always pondered what this organization Todt was. Todt means dead in German. And so I thought: it must be some dead organization. But later, I learnt from a film that this Todt was actually Hitler’s coworker. He was a builder, and he was taking these people from the Sudetenland to work for him. Two other people arrived there with him, and they opted. Do you know what opting means? They opted. And they were sent back home. Our parents also decided to opt, and they filled in the papers for that. But grandpa convinced them not to do it. He told them: ´They would make us go to the Protectorate, you don’t know anyone there, so you would have to live in some camp. You got kids. You’d better not send these documents.´ Thus they didn’t send them and Dad then had to go to work in Russia.”
“He has been all the way to Kiev, and in Kharkiv, too, I think. He has survived the great retreat over the river Dnepr. He said that they rode on horses, and that there were cars, and tanks, too, and all this was rolling over that bridge. Everyone was running away and the Russians were chasing them. He said that if someone had stumbled, they would have driven over him. It wouldn’t stop. After this, he was back to Poland. Then, when the war front approached, they were sent to Germany again, to Stuttgart. He became seriously ill in Stuttgart and he wanted to return home. They told him: ´You cannot go there anymore; the Russians are there.´ He showed them a letter from his mom, to let them know that no Russians were there yet. And so, they let him go and he arrived home in April. He was still quite sick even after he got home. I remember that he was lying in bed and vomiting. He would say: ´I will follow old Zahrada.´ Zahrada was the name of one of the neighbours who had died, and he meant that he would follow him. But he recovered.”
“Dad somehow didn’t want to join. At first he worked in the cooperative sowing. But he didn’t like it, and so he came back and farmed for himself again. But it was… I remember that once he failed to deliver a few kilograms of meat for the given year. He said: ´I will keep the calf and I will deliver it after the New Year. They can then count it as this year’s delivery.´ But they fined him ten thousand Crowns, and they declared him a kulak and a class enemy. The small farmers would come and ask: ´Mr. Kotraš, come to plow the field.´ He would go and plow it for them. They would help us with some field work in return. But he didn’t want to join the cooperative and they tried to force him to. But then one of them warned him: ´Hynek, join the cooperative or they will imprison you.´ Dad said: ´Why would they imprison me? I meet the delivery quotas and I don’t do anything against the state.´ - ´But you’ll see, they’ll imprison you.´ The small farmers had said: ´As long as Mr. Kotraš is plowing the fields for us, we will not join the cooperative, either.´ They had just one cow, for example. They will report that you instigated people. They will make something up against you. Realize that they are really already plotting against you. Join the cooperative, or they will imprison you, you’ll see.´ Dad thus eventually joined. But afterwards he was quite happy in the cooperative.”
“Our parents lived over there in the second house from the bottom. The road led up the hill. At night, I heard the shots from a place just above their house. In the morning, people were saying: A policeman was shot on the road. The one who shot him was a partisan, his name was Písařák. People talked about where he went, and so on. It happened at night. They used to go to our neighbours’ house, too. I don’t know, perhaps he was on his way from there. The path leads there behind the village all the way up to the pub. Or he may have walked up the road, and the policeman may have walked downhill. He ordered him to stop and identify himself. But he pulled out a gun instead and shot him. The policeman dropped down dead. People were angry. They were afraid that the Germans would shoot us all because of this shooting of the policeman.”
Blažena Žerníčková, née Kotrašová, was born in 1930 in Jakubovice in the Šumperk region. Her native village is located in the border region in the foothills of the Jeseníky Mountains, and in 1938 it was taken over by Germany as part of the Sudetenland territory. Around the village there were mostly Czech villages, which formed an isolated area of Czech population in the predominantly German border region. The Kotraš family were Czechs, and while none of them had to join the wehrmacht, her father Hynek was forced to go to the Soviet Union with the organization Todt, and work there for several months. Her husband, František, from nearby Hostice was imprisoned in Terezín for one year for his involvement in the resistance movement. During the war, partisans were hiding near Jakubovice, and they were often coming to the village. One of them shot a German policeman there. After the war, the family settled in a former German farm in nearby Raškov. Her father was threatened with arrest during the collectivization process in the village, because he refused to join the unified agricultural cooperative. Mrs. Žerníčková lives in Uničov today.
