Hermína Eliášová

“But I do have one ugly memory. When the war was over and they came up to our uncle’s place - my dad had already died. They took [my uncle] out, sat him on a chair. They came on horses, those boys who called themselves partisans, claimed to be. Those were seventeen-, eighteen-year-old blighters. They dragged him down, held him [?], kept toying with him like this and wanted to get some information from him. They wanted to get something out of him. He sat there, and I can tell you that it’s a dreadful feeling. A really dreadful feeling. They must have punched him two or three times because he bled afterwards. Then they got on their horses and rode off again. So - those were our saviours. That wasn’t nice.”

“When we came home from school, we got changed, and we had to take the cows and put them to graze. Well, and then, it often happened that we were baking something, potatoes, for instance, and they ran off into the cabbage patch - like I told you. But it wasn’t just around the back of the house, it was also a kilometre away - we had to go there. We had skis in the winter, we’d go skiing. Those were just planks with laces, a narrow kind so they’d hold in place.”