"Suddenly there was dust all over the place. That was the German artillery arriving. So many cars! This is where the war ended, actually, here at Stráň. This is where the artillery was, behind the house. Over there on that level bit. Around here, behind the fields over at Šumvald, on Lázek [a hill - transl.]. Tracked cars, ordinary cars, tanks. And then they started firing. As soon as we saw all the dust, we knew there'd be no capturing Šumvald. We'd get ourselves a hiding there! So the firing started. The women went up and down the courtyard carrying blankets into the cellar. Their skirts floating in the billowing air. And the shells coming from Strážná, from Lázek, how they screeched through the sky. My neighbour came rushing up, saying: 'All our windows are shattered.' They were firing from just next door. And I thought to myself: 'That wouldn't be so bad. It'll be worse when the Russians discover them. When the katyushas start. The cottage will surely go up in flames then.' So I quickly began towing the machinery out of the barn."
"One Gestapo man led me by my cuff to this room and stood me by a clouded glass window, looking out. So I could see everything that was going on behind me like in a mirror. 'Stand there at attention. If you make a move, you'll get a beating.' They stood Minář and Drozda a bit further on. And then they brought in another person and one of those already standing turned to look. He shouldn't have. The Gestapo man jumped at him, gave him a kicking, grabbed him by the hair and bashed him against the wall till there was blood gushing out of his nose. So we stayed standing for a long long time."
"So I led them here into Hoštejn through the forests behind the Drozda lumber mill. The Germans had blasted their warehouses there a few days before. They had the stuff stacked up all along the road, with stockpiles in the forest leading right up to the Drozda lumber mill. Shells, bullets, grenades, dynamite. Heaps of ammunition. Well, and when they called the retreat, they blasted it all. How the cottage shook. You could see the trees cartwheeling into the sky all the way from our house. And my granddad was making kindling at chopping block, and he said: 'Goodness! Would this be the end of the world? The ground is trembling all over!' Whole wagonfuls of dynamite. The road disappeared completely in some places. Blown on to the meadow. The bridge was blown up, and the road beyond, on the left side when going to Hoštejn. Such destruction. The explosions made little valleys of their own. You can tell them to this day."
"It was a one-bed cell, and we were already crowded. We could hardly move. They let me lie on the one plank. I lay there on my side, turning over every now and then. My hands had gotten so tired that when they uncuffed me to eat, I couldn't even hold the spoon. They uncuffed me for about ten minutes. Otherwise I had them on all the time, even overnight. And they weren't chain ones, they were solid, rigid cuffs, holding my hands close like this, behind my back. My hands were all swollen up. Festering. You walked around the cell, scraped against the wall, and the metal went click and tightened up and there was nothing you could do. Or you'd push against them in your sleep - awful. Awful!"
"They brought Jarmara in unconscious. They threw him on the floor, locked the door and left. He had on him this military uniform without facings. Off duty stuff. And his backside - it was mashed up with his trousers. The skin just blood. You could even see the bone in one place. Trval, the chap from Mohelnice, he'd had a visit not long before, his wife had brought him clean clothes, a towel and little bit of food. So he used his clean towel and handkerchief to tend the wound. [Jarmara] came round and told us: 'The one who came for me, he sat on my feet. They stretched me on a bench, tied my hands under the wood and the one who came for me, he sat on my feet, and another one beat me. That's why I'm so broken up. They kept at it until I had to tell them we were heading west with the resistance, that we weren't joined up eastward.' He said it somehow like that. He lived through. It healed."
Josef Hroch was born in 1920 in the recluse of Velká Stráň by Cotkytle in the Lanškroun district. This remote region in the foothills of the Eagle (Orlické) Mountains and the High Ash (Jeseníky) Mountains has been sorely tried throughout history. Despite the fact that the surrounding villages were predominantly Czech, through the Munich Agreement the whole area became part of the Great German Reich. Even during such trying times however, a considerable number of local inhabitants joined in resistance activities. As did Josef Hroch. He stockpiled ammunition in his house and supported the local partisans. In the spring of 1944 he was arrested, spending two months in the Šumperk prison. He was held chained with self-tightening handcuffs for almost all of that time, with every movement causing the metal to dig into his wrists. After the two months he was released for want of evidence. Not even such an experience was enough to keep Josef Hroch from helping the resistance. He hid Russian captives on his grounds. In the final stages of the war the retreating German artillery chose its defensive position right next to his cottage - shells were lobbed right over the roof of his house. After the war he started to work his estate. But Nazism was followed by Communism and with it forced collectivization. First of all they seized the family’s heavy machinery, then their livestock, and in the end their lands. He was given no alternative but to join a “united agricultural co-op” (JZD). In 1990 his lands were returned to him, but it took much work to return them to their former state. Josef Hroch still lives in his native cottage.
