Pavla Hájková

"And so my parents had a krystalka, I'm just sorry that it wasn't preserved somewhere. And they had an earpiece and on May 5th - I didn't know until my mother said that the revolution started on May 5th, so they ran upstairs and stuck the receiver in and listened to the radio calling for help. So the men from the two or three neighbouring huts gathered and said they were going to help. And there was no... there was no traffic, it was impossible. They couldn't drive either, even if they had private cars, so they couldn't, because they weren't allowed, they didn't get gas for the Germans, they couldn't. So they allegedly walked on foot, through the woods. They got there; it took several days. It must have been terrible anxiety for the mothers, the wives too. So we children didn't take it like that. They survived it, they got there. And then they got back - I don't know if by steamboat or how, it turned out well. But above all, the crystal gave the impulse that it was already happening. Because otherwise they wouldn't have been known anything there."

"That there was a concentration camp or an accommodation camp in Hradištěk where the prisoners were. Well, they went to the Kocáby valley to work, they drove them there. And as my parents said, the Germans were actually preparing a retreat towards Slapy. So the Kocába was not regulated at that time, somehow to strengthen the banks, so those prisoners, poor people, had to cut down trees in the forest and actually reinforce the sides of the stream with those stakes, so that they would have a firmer path and the feeling that they would be able to cross the Slapy. Well, they always brought them and at noon for some reason - I don't know why, but for some reason they let them out at noon, the prisoners. And not only was my mother there with us, but there was a neighbour next door and another neighbour. And you prisoners, because the gate was down, it was all closed, wired, so before the parents figured it out, or the mothers, that they were actually holding down the fence and that they were probably hungry, it took some days before that's they figured it out. So then they agreed with each other and one cooked soup, the other cooked something else, buns, and they opened it for the moment when the prisoners there - it's such a narrow path around - when they were running, they opened it, they ran in there and they gave them something to eat. They probably gave them something to take with them, I don't know. And they left again, and it happened like that almost every day."