Růžena Fučíková

„But dad saw that some of the soldiers were sewing revolvers in their coat tails, in their coats, and they were supposed to hand their weapons over here at the town sqquare. But dad saw these sewing them in and they had not handed in their guns and hid it in our house behind some plank or so. And dad said: ‘We’re going back to Jestřebice. This is going to get bad here.‘ Mom had a pie in the oven, potato soap on the stove, we just left everything as it was and off we went. But the Matuškas did not join us because mom delivered Mrs. Matušková of a baby girl, her name was Zdenička. She lived only until the following day and the baby was stillborn. She was so beautiful, I saw it for the first time in my life, such a tiny baby, and she was dead. They put her in such a small box. And the Matuška family stayed back and we went back to Jestřebice but we returned about two hours later when we found that there was no fighting going on. In Táborka, they took on the eighth, neighbour’s boy, he was about seventeen, Bohouš was about seventeen years old. They locked him up in their armoured personnel carrier and they tried to squeeze some information from him. In German, obviously. And Bohouš pretended to be dumb, deaf. Because his father had a brother who was deaf and who lived in their house so Bohouš could lip-read, so he pretended that he couldn’t hear and he was locked in the APC until it got dark. And they kept him under guard. And then during the night, he managed to run away.”

„So we were there, our family, and then I saw Mrs. Kašparová, they shot her husband, and she was pregnant, very so. She was throwing up there, where she was leaning against one cottage and she was vomiting a lot, it must have been horrible for her. And then announcements came. The dads were on guard, they were checking where from more Germans could appear. They would say: ‘They shot Mr. Hodík, the teacher, they shot the doctor, they shot…, they shot…, they murdered the whole Di-Lotti family of Dr. Kálalová. It’s not possible, this. It was painful, horribly so. And we were there on the eighth and we were returning from Jestřebice on the 9th in the evening, across those fields again, through the back path. And we got home and the cottage was fine, from the outside. From the street, it was, all houses were, there were bullet holes everywhere but nothing was set on fire, there were just holes in the houses. One couldn’t go out to the street because they would get shot dead the very moment, anyone. They kept shooting people. Even looking out of the window was not possible. And again, parents stood guard during the night, there was less shooting but the shoot-outs continued. The shoot-outs went on. And when we opened, unlocked the door, the house was taken over by the soldiers, by Germans.”

„And we walked there and it was really bad but we did not know it. Because we thought that the Americans would come. And when we walked across a meadow, such a small meadow, and we walked into a field, the German soldiers started to shoot at us from the church tower. And at that time, there were many people shot to death, I and Božka left just in time. And those who did not wait, there was this airplane which flew from here, turned around above the Fučík’s house and started fire. They set the Fučík house on fire, and Herink’s house, and those folks in front of the town hall, they just fired at them and that’s how it started. And the German soldiers who were in the school, they took over the tower, four cardinal directions, and they shot at everyone in sight. And they had a good view of the Posvátný hill, in the fields here towards the back, and they could see them from a ringside seat. And when they started to shoot at us, the parents said, ‚Duck!’ and we lay down, there was rye, it was already ripe so it was quite high and folks from the whole street were hiding there.”