Růžena Hronová

"In 1946 I was included in a Red Cross trip to Sweden for four months. My mother had three unmarried children at home and no pension and no work except for farming, so I was chosen to go. The whole train was sent out, we got to Gothenburg, and there we were in a kind of quarantine for about three or four Sundays, in wooden huts, and then we were separated into families. I was somewhere near Sundsvall. I was in the woods there, so they had a summer and winter kitchen, bunkhouses, they weren't little cabins. They had a few cows, and they made their living by having those cows and having the men go fishing. To the mountains to dry hay and to the river to catch fish. So I only went with them once to the mountains, they never took me to the river, saying it was dangerous and they couldn't watch me and so on. But the tragedy was that I didn't speak a word, so I tried the German. But I knew 'Hello' and 'Goodbye' and I knew 'I'm hungry'. So I tried 'I'm hungry', but nobody understood even the simplest thing, that I was hungry. So after about a week, I would indicate with a sign that I would eat something, because that week I was, I don't know, I'll say, sad, I just really only ate what was necessary or had a drink. I had no appetite, I was homesick. But after a week, I indicated that I was hungry. So there was joy in the whole family!"

"And the witness, who was seven years old at the time, spoke up and remembered that my dad and the other gentleman had been warned by his dad not to go on that road into those fields, that the Germans were shooting there. And indeed, afterwards they found my father lying in that field already dead. Unfortunately, his colleague had snuck away, he hadn't told anyone that he was there with another colleague, so maybe dad might have been alive if help had arrived in time. So the guys found him in a clover field, a handful of clover in his hand. So my mother hid the clover in a box for many years, and every time she opened it she cried. I confess that I hid the clover once so that my mother couldn't get to it, so that she wouldn't have to... no, so that she wouldn't have to keep reminding herself of that moment. My sister, who was with mom in that Chodov, came running and said to me 'Dad died!' Well, somehow I didn't realise the impact of the word and I said 'How did he die?' 'Well, he's not coming. You won't see him again.' It was only then that I realised what had actually happened, so I ran to the school and I wanted to see him. But there was a teacher outside the school and he wouldn't let me in. That there were forty, or even more, forty-five dead people and that it was impossible for a nine-year-old girl to see so much suffering. So to remember him as he lived with us at home."

"But then I also remember, very often, how my father, when he came home from work, made himself a pint pot of white - well, you can't say coffee - white ersatz coffee, crumbled some bread into it, and I sat down next to him, and we both ate the crumbled bread out of the pot. And sometimes when I say that to somebody now, even to a friend the same age, she always says, 'Please, you could have eaten crumbled bread?' And I remember it was yummy. And sometimes I even make it.

"So when we found out we didn't have a father and that there would be a funeral, suddenly my mother - she was 43 years old, a young, pretty girl - I don't have a dress for the funeral. So she went and borrowed one from somebody. Oh, yeah, she's got to wash it, hasn't she, so she put it in wooden washtub. No washing machine, no nothing, in a wooden washtub, she wrung it out, didn't even take it to the rack. Now she takes them out, she washes them, she puts them up like this, and they were this big [small]. 'Girls, come and see!' So three of us ran, the fourth mum, and all four of us started laughing out loud. And my mom said, 'Oh my God, don't laugh, we're sad, and we're laughing so hard.'"

"For the joint funeral, they dug up... Actually, there wasn't even a cemetery there, so they set up a piece of a field near Kateřinky, dug a common grave, and put all the 46 or 48 people there, one coffin next to the other. So it was a huge funeral, there were bridesmaids in white, because there was a child there. All the peasants put wagons with horses, three or four coffins were piled on each wagon, flowers, wreaths, everything was full. And the procession went through Chodov to the cemetery."