Stanislav Bodlák

“There in our house in Veveří, those used to be lodgings for a [military] company, and there would be some four hundred of us there. We were crammed in there like rabbits. Two sleeping on one bed. I was lucky that I was sleeping together with my father, but when they took him away, I slept alone for a short while and then with someone else. Dad, because he had experience from the war, he said: ‘Cleanliness, hygiene. As soon as you get lice, you’re done for.’ I had one set of clothes. A sort of pink shirt. While it was still warm in the autumn, and the warmth lasted a long time in that year of forty-three, I washed it in the trough every day. Especially the collar. That’s how I slowly learnt how to avoid getting ill.”

“No grub. When we came there the first day, we didn’t get anything. Not until the next day in the morning, we got black chicory coffee, a slice of bread. At noon it was turnip, soup. As yellow as chicken soup, seeing how it was brewed from the beet. In it we had four or five beet noodles, one tiny potato, a piece of bread. The same in the evening. Watery food. I got dropsy from it, water on the knee. And I didn’t even do what the other blokes did when they didn’t have enough - they added in cold water to have more of it in their stomach.”