"So, from both classes, fourteen students were not allowed by the district committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia to take the leaving exam. They were students from politically unacceptable families to the regime at that time. The ministry thought it was too many, so when they came, the headmaster´s office or the District Committee Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had to allow seven students to take the exam. And those seven were not allowed. And there was my husband, doing distance learning, among those seven. So even though he had passed the written part, he wasn´t allowed to take the oral exams."
"There were a few young men from Lipnice who came to the station and wanted to…whether they wanted to lynch the Germans in any way, I don't know, I would be doing them an injustice. But Daddy was just barring the door to the office of the two Austrians with his own body, and because there were more of those young men from Lipno, some of them, among them Bedřich Plichta and Ladislav Havel, went into the open door of dad's office and took his handgun. And the handgun was signed, on the holster of the handgun. When they were at Květinov's, when they were on their motorbike going to Brod for reports and then returning to Humpolec, they were arrested at Květinov where the Germans had already been slaughtering the captured Czechs. So they found my father´s holster on them and they went to the station at Lipnice to get my father."
"He became very friendly with my husband. I know that yet on my wedding day, Honza brought me a bunch of yellow roses. But we broke up because of me, because my classmate was arranging for me to meet Honza in the afternoon after school in Humpolec, before my bus would go. So we were standing at the railing in the corridor and I saw a Latin teacher going up the stairs, towards us, I got scared and said I wasn't going anywhere. Honza was offended and we broke up, we were students. But we remained friends and eventually they were great friends with my husband."
"I remember it very well because it was supposed to be within three days, when the post-February purges started. So my father was summoned to the action committee and there it was decided to move us out of Lípa within three days. Because of my father's involvement in the National Socialist Party and the Sokol."
"My husband was very curious, he liked getting new knowledge. He decided, despite his parents' opposition, to study a secondary school. He wrote to the Ministry of Education himself, got the curriculum, bought textbooks and started to study. He began to study while working. He recalled that, for example, the local parish priest taught him Latin, or he was learning new vocabulary and his younger sister was testing him while he was loading manure. All the study was done at work or at night. In 1951, at the time of his secondary school graduation, when he had already taken all his exams, he was writing written part - it was still Latin, a written test. And I remember a classmate saying to me during a break: 'Is Vojta gone? Either he's failed or he's finished.' He was so good at Latin that he managed to write the test easily, very quickly. So he passed the written leaving exams. Just before the exams, at the time of the so-called holy week [week off for study, trans.], they came from the district saying that in the class, in fact there were two graduation classes, fourteen people would not be admitted to the leaving exam by the decision of the Communist Party Central Committee and the local Communist Party. For various reasons, for example, the husband was a son of a village rich man, so he was an enemy of the regime. And it was only six years later, in 1957, when I was finishing university, my husband was allowed by his employer to finish his leaving exam. And it was only then that he started to study agricultural engineering, a course in zootechnics, by distance learning."
" At that time Daddy was at the police station in Lipnice. I remember an event that affected me most as a twelve-year-old child. May 1945. At that police station, it was near the castle, so at that police station, actually, only my dad stayed during the uprising. At that time there were two military police officers in the next room, they were Austrians. They were sent there to keep order. In such a tense situation and with such hot-blooded young men, suddenly a whole group of young people turned up at the station. They wanted to lynch those two poor, already elderly gentlemen, Austrians, who probably hadn´t left their homes willingly either. Daddy blocked their [young men´s] way, with his own body he prevented them from entering that room, and demanded that they respect the Geneva convention concerning the protection of war prisoners. And because they were quite a large group, without Daddy knowing it, some of them broke into his office, where he had a handgun on a hanger. So after the hot-blooded young men left, Daddy discovered that his handgun was missing. It had a very unfortunate ending, because those two young men with another group wanted to attack the German garrison in Havlíčkův Brod. But they [the Germans] were fully armed, so they captured many people. And at Květinov, on the way from Havlíčkův Brod to Humpolec, they executed the whole group there, absolutely cynically."
Jindřiška Jirsová, née Pospíšilová, was born on 30 August 1933 in Libčeves in northern Bohemia. Her father Rudolf Pospíšil was a Czechoslovak police officer and served in the Sudetenland until 1939, when he was transferred to Lipnice nad Sázavou in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. His family followed him. Her father helped local people during the German occupation and after the war he was awarded for his patriotic contribution. On the day when the World War II began, when the Germans invaded Poland, the witness entered the first class. Rudolf Pospíšil is said to have stood up for two Austrian military police officers in the revolutionary days of 1945 which apparently saved them from being allegedly lynched. During the incident, two young men, probably Bedřich Plichta and Ladislav Havel, who were bringing situation reports from Německý Brod [later Havlíčkův Brod, trans.] to Lipnice, were believed to have stolen his revolver. Then the men did not return from the district town on 5 May, were captured by the Gestapo and tortured on 6 May in the place called Lázničkova stráň [hillside]. For the rest of his life, Rudolf Pospíšil blamed himself that the young men had been killed because of his stolen revolver. After the war, the family moved to nearby Lípa, from where they were evicted after 1948 and then lived in Senožaty near Humpolec. The witness graduated from the Humpolec grammar school in 1951. Her husband, as the son of a village landowner, was not allowed to take the leaving exam. A few years later, the family of her husband, Vojtěch Jirsa, was evicted from the family farm during collectivization. Her husband did not graduate from secondary school until 1957. After graduation from university, Jindřiška, like her husband, began teaching. Her husband could teach until 1971, when he was forced to leave the education system. He returned to the teaching profession after November 1989. The farm was returned to the family at the property restitution process. At the time of the filming (July 2021), the witness lived in Humpolec.
