"We had a hole dug behind the barn and we hid a sewing machine there too and next to it we hid all kinds of things, potatoes, cucumbers... We hid everything from the Russians. They came to loot. They came, looked around - and: 'There is nothing!' And Mum: 'Just go, you bitch!' The Russians left, and we went and dug up sacks of potatoes and everything there was, a bunch of smoked bacon. We had to have it when there was a war, there had to keep an extra stash."
"For fourteen days the Russians took us by train. We stopped somewhere in Bulgaria, and immediately the children came running, crying and wanting bread, so we threw bread and bacon from the train, but also notebooks and pencils. But then my uncle noticed that in the meantime they had cut a hole in our carriage and stolen the carriage wheel. But in the middle of the wheel we had hidden gold fives, rubles, which we wanted to pay with in Bohemia. And now we didn't know what we were going to live on!"
"I went to school and herded cows. I worked in agriculture since I was a child. I don't have any good stories from my childhood - there was still war and we were always hiding somewhere. When the front came over, we went back to the fields, mowed, made sheaves, threshed and then put the grain in sacks and went to the mill to make flour. And when there was really a war, the flour was ground on the millstones - between two stones. Then it was sifted through a sieve and the coarse meal was given to the pigs, the goats. It was just agriculture."
Marie Kadeřábková, née Špačková, was born on 27 May 1933 in the village of Kozín in Volhynia. Her father died when she was three years old. She spent most of her childhood working on the family farm and only went to school for a few years. She does not remember the war years fondly; during the five years of the war, Volhynia was under alternating Soviet and Nazi occupation, and the civilian population was also cruelly affected by ethnic fighting between Ukrainians and Poles. During this period, the family of the witness concentrated mainly on providing for their own living needs. They raised cattle, farmed fields, processed sheep’s wool, and sewed shoes. In early 1944, her stepfather, along with many other Volhynian men, joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps, which was pushing the Germans out of Eastern Europe with the Soviets. In the autumn, he was killed near Dukla during the failed Carpatho-Dukla operation. Marie Kadeřábková’s family took the opportunity to return to Czechoslovakia. In 1947, Marie Kadeřábková, together with her mother and sister, arrived in Šumperk after a difficult journey of several weeks on the re-migrant train. In 1949 she married Alois Žídek, with whom she had a daughter. In 1961 she married a second time, to Rudolf Kadeřábek, and a year later they had a daughter. She visited her birthplace twice as an adult. However, she never found her birth farm again. Over the years, the locals dismantled it and ploughed up the land. In 2023 Marie Kadeřábková lived in Neznášov near Jaroměř.
