Hana Havlíčková

"There were still an awful lot of Germans here [in Šumperk]. They walked around with those armbands on their sleeves and I was terribly afraid of them. Maybe it wasn't some fear that they would hurt me, I don't know, but I think it was the way they were always talked about as being evil. I was eight years old, I was little. When I saw them walking down the road, when I went shopping, maybe to get bread, or we would walk around the corner - there was a pub just down the road - so we would go to my parents with a jug of beer, for example, and if I was walking down the street and it was just Germans walking, I would wait around the corner for someone without a belt to walk. I was afraid to go in the company of Germans. It was a fear like a child is afraid of the dark - he knows that there is nothing there, that nothing will happen to him..."

"[Dad] was so discreet. I think he was, how can I put it, not truthful, but he could keep his word. People trusted him when he would announce something. As a lawyer, he also knew how to deal with people, so he was unanimously elected [as] chairman of the national committee. Then the German command there-but I know this from hearsay-declared that if there was any shooting, they would shoot the city leaders-the revolutionary national committee. So he was basically a hostage. There were a lot of partisan groups in the area, that was known about Vysočina. I'll digress again - I know that from hearsay too - my sister remembered that, I don't anymore. There was a pond not far from Nové Město, and just behind it is the biathlon centre. We used to walk to the Black Pond there, play or pick flowers, and dad would go into the woods to pick mushrooms. He used to carry various files with him, and we believe he had contact with the partisans, but this is unfounded."