Marie Jáčová

"There were those ration cards, at the time I was still at school in Boleslav, that was 1949-50. Whoever had a field didn't get tickets for flour rations. We baked bread at home, but we went secretly to the mill, where the miller said: 'Come in the evening, I'll give you flour.' It was a rye flour, it was a bread flour, and we baked eight loaves of bread at home. There's still an oven in that cottage, like on this picture there, and that's where my father baked the bread. They would make the machines useless, they would put a seal on them, as they weren't allowed to be used. It was really dangerous, if someone had turned us in, we could end up in a concentration camp or something. My brother and I, we were always watching for intruders, one on the lower side of the house, one on the other side, and our father would process all the groats and we would sieve it all. We made pancakes out of the first batch and the coarse one was used to make polenta."

"My neighbor's son was serving in Příšovice and the boys were just curious, as the soldiers were leaving their rifles behind and and other things as well. So there were two boys who went there to see what's going on and unfortunately one of them was shot by the Germans. As the trains were advancing they were shooting at people from the train. We went to his funeral, and it was a custom back then that the young men had to wear suits, and we wore those long white dresses, so we went to the cemetery in Vrtki to bid him farewell. And when we almost reached the woods, the dive bombers started flying over us, coming from the highlands where the airfield was. We scattered into the woods because we didn't know what was going to happen. But they flew away and we finished our journey to the cemetery."

"We sat at the well with our neighbors and waited to see what would happen. Across the field, from the side of Vrchovina near Hodkovice [nad Mohelkou], this group of German soldiers came, there were maybe eleven of them. They came to our yard. We were afraid of what would happen. They weren't armed, just one of them had a submachine gun, the one who went last. We didn't know enough German to speak to them. They wanted something to drink, they were thirsty. My parents gave me a cup, so I went to the pump, I would pump it and give them some water to drink. And they went on. Later, it was said, but I don't know if it was true, that they were all shot at this solitary house near Hlavice. That some partisans were camping there and they would just fall into their hands."

"Since we didn't want to join the cooperative, I remember... I was already married by then, we were still living in Radlice, my older son was still just a baby back then. Three gentlemen from the district came to recruit us for the United Agricultural Coop and they said... My husband worked at the Severka Enterprise in Český Dub. Since we were resisting, they came and said, 'We are coming for your husband, we have to get him fired immediately because you don't want to submit to what we are asking you to do.' It was very difficult because I ran away from home with my son in my arms to escape the horror. I was scared of what was going to happen because I couldn't imagine what we were going to live on if my husband wasn't employed. They left, but then the recruitment pushed through and we had to join the coop.”

"After the 1945, a neighbor came to see my father, they were quite poor, to be honest, and he said: 'Well, Mr Starý, I've come to recruit for the Communist Party, I bet you'll be the first to sign up.' And my father refused him straight away, as he was never a fan of that party. So after that, we were pretty much excluded from everything, because if you weren't a comrade your access to all the resources was quite limited."