„When the Germans were after the guerrillas cashing them uphill, two of them got lost. The Nazis took three villages and took us all to the railway station with an electric wire all around it. We though we´re going straight to concentration camp without even managing to tie our shoe laces. Then they let us go with my daughter to a small house at the station, so I knew it won´t be that bad as every tenth person getting shot as they did in Bosna. Then one of our representatives stood out, who could speak German, up on the causeway track and said: ‚Of something happens to these people, the forest will be full of guerrillas and there is no one with them at the moment.‘ He was a brave man. And the Germans actually let us go then.“
„They were poking pins under the nails of my husband during interrogation. Because his hand was twitching, one guy sat on it and my husband bit his butt through his pants. They beat him to half death."
Božena Dardová, née Pomahačová, was born in 1928 in Malá Ludina in Croatia. Her family moved there after a mining accident in 1907, in which her father got injured. Later he made his living as a home painter and her mother was a dressmaker. Her husband, Karel Darda, whom she married at the age of sixteen in 1944, was a blacksmith and worked with the partisans during war and helped refugees hiding in a surrounding forest. After the disclosure he got arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camp Jasenovec. Due to his lawyer´s intervention he had to be released. The family of Božena Dardová was threatened during intervention of German troops to the guerrillas, but finally the event happened without any incident. Helping the guerrillas cost life of the brother-in-law of the witness too. In 1949 Božena Dardová returned to Czechoslovakia with the whole family. Božena Dardová died in 2016.
