Pavel Bednář

"It ended after the liberation. It's a well-known affair, the Štěchovice archive. Towards the end of the war, the Nazis didn't have time to clean up the documents from Prague Castle, so they took them here, to Hradištko, and hid them in a horizontal shaft, covered them up, and mined it. One of the German soldiers, maybe an officer, got to the Americans in West Germany, and he told them. They then came with a lot of equipment, like three cars, because it was mined and so on. Workers came and they used a compressor to dig the hole; they couldn't use pickaxes. They were blowing the dirt off with a blower and so on. Well, they were well-versed and they knew how to do it and they actually picked up the archive and took it to West Germany. Our government was already protesting at the time. They returned it, but what was there, what they took, what they kept, we don't know."

"That was the experience of my wife who was born in 1941. She lived in Třebsín, just outside Prague. They experienced the war more harshly because they were in the Hradištko area, and that was a territory that the Germans had taken. They moved all the population out of there and made a kind of camp there. The aim was probably to move people out of Central Bohemia altogether. It was bordered by the Vltava River in the west, by the Prague - Benešov - Tábor railway line in the east, by the Sázava River in the north, and down there it went almost to Sedlčany. The critical place here was Hradištko with a concentration camp. We don't know what the Germans actually did there. There were prisoners, arrests, a lot of French people."

"We experienced air raid alerts, especially towards the end of the war. Civil defence worked and most houses had cellars back then, so we had somewhere to hide. We could hear the hooting. We were issued with this map. When the hooting was slow, we knew those were the Allied planes; I'm say 'Allied' but they were referred to as foreign planes, yet we considered them Allies. And they flew over. When they were far away, the hooting was slow, when they got closer, it got faster. That's how you could tell if there was an acute danger. That has persisted to the present time. Every first Wednesday of the month at noon they test this system and we hear this short horn."