Marie Blažková

„Then the Russians came. Everything was theirs. They took a cow and killed it, they had to eat something. And they were terribly… I can’t say dirty, I think that at that time, it was all they maanged. But, they were full of lice. And, behind our barn, they set up a large caludron and naked men lay in the grass and they were boiling their clothes to get rid of the lice. That’s what I remember they were doing. Mom was awfully worried for us. They were not exactly civilized.”

„The neighbours came to tell dad to cover the drainage ditches in the field, that there would be tanks riding all over the place and they would damage them. And that they would go and help him. So they were doing that in the fields and the Germans, the SS or whoever they were, came there. And they [dad and the other men] said that they were Czechs, that it was not their fault. And they told them: ‚Every Czech is a resistence fighter‘ and shot them all point blank. One of them died only after three days and he told us this.“

"Mom, when dad was shot, she was told that she would get a pension. It was before the monetary reform so she got a widow's pension and orphan pension for the children, it was one thousand crowns altogether. And when she did not want to go, it was in 1953 after the monetary reform, she was getting two hundred crowns for herself and for us, and when she did not join the United Agricultural Cooperative, they took that away, too. And they just... they just could do anything, right."