"We did this because we wanted to help them. Because the people of Vysočina took care of us and in order to pay them back, we tried to help them as much as we could. When they brought us medicaments and cotton wool and I don't know what else, we tried to make medical packs and give it to them so that they would have a sort of a first-aid kit. [Did you also cook for them or something like that?] Yes, my mother cooked for them. But most of the time the cooking was done by the people we slept over at."
"That's where I have that story from. My mom told my dad: 'you're always out in the forest, and I've heard that there're some partisans out there in Vysočina. You don't say a word'. My dad told her to wait, that she'll soon see. A few days later, somebody knocked on our window and it was the partisans. A commissioner and their commander came to our house to ask for our support. They wanted to use our house for accommodation. Of course we supported them. It was the Soviets. They were ours. So we tried to help them as much as possible."
"We strolled around the countryside. I don't remember anymore where it was. The Gestapo troops commanded the roads so we hid in the forests. We had to get via other villages to Poděšín. The snow was thawing and we were all wet and exhausted. Finally, we made it to Poděšín."
"Jarmila got married, I think it might have been around the autumn of that year. She moved with her husband to Žďár [nad Sázavou]. There, they got an apartment and they lived their lives there. But the Gestapo would harass them anyway. Each day, a Gestapo man would come to their place and ask her about the whereabouts of her parents. She told him: 'How am I supposed to know where they are? I'm here and they're gone somewhere. I have no idea where they are'. That was at the time when we had already gone to the woods. They would come to their place every single day."
"So we had to leave again. Then we stayed over at our relatives' place in Velká Losenice. The man we stayed over at was a police man, so it wasn't that much suspicious. We lived there for some time and the police men would bring us medicaments from Prague so that we could assemble the first aid packs for the guerillas to carry them in their pockets. In the meantime, our headquarters, where Major Fomin was in charge – there was the radio operator Máša, nurse Lída, radio operator Saša and a few of our boys – was moving and it fell into the hands of the Germans. They got all shot there."
Irena Hrbáčková, née Hlávková, was born on September 14, 1930 in Vojnův Městec in the region of Vysočina in what was then Czechoslovakia. She grew up in Račíně, where she completed elementary school and then went on to study a municipal secondary school. This was already at the time of the war. On October 26, 1944, the airborne guerilla brigade “Mistr Jan Hus” was landed on the territory of the Protectorate. Its commander was Alexander Fomin. Irena’s father Viktor and her brother Miroslav joined the guerillas and they provided the partisans with accommodation at their house. Later, the whole family of Irena left the house and followed the guerillas to the forests because they were afraid of German reprisals. Little Irena and her mother thus went wandering through the woods. They stayed over at some of the villages they crossed and helped the partisans with cooking food and the preparation of packs with medicaments. After the war was over, Irena Hrbáčková finished her secondary education and then went for an apprenticeship in the Moravolen in the Šumpersko region, where she subsequently worked in the Research Institute of Bast Fiber. In 1951, she married an army signalman and due to the character of her husband’s profession, they were on the road quite frequently. She thus gradually lived in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, in Znojmo, in Havlíčkův Brod, in Tábor and in Písek. In the last two of the places, she worked alongside her husband as a signalwoman for the army, serving in a military telephone switchboard office. She presently lives in Písek.
