“So then he began organising, his name was Nikolai Kuzmin, and he was all the way from Sochi. And Sochi is Russian now. And so he then started actually directing operations from our home, he made forays from our place. But it was like that with us too, that sometimes two partisans came, sometimes four at once, sometimes even six. And so it went, practically all the time. We always had - they slept in the hay in the barn - so we always made it up for them and they slept there. And of course we had to cook even when they came hungry in the night sometimes.”
“And of course we had neighbours that we were afraid of. We had our house, and then five minutes, less even, our barn, and we took things to the barn in a big basket as if for the cows. It was for hay, and Dad took the food in the basket so that it couldn’t be seen from the other cottages, so they would tell on us. There were some pretty bad people too. But thank God, thank God, it worked out well.”
“And of course there was talk of partisans. We hadn’t seen them yet, just once the dog barked a lot and kept rushing around, so Dad went and had a look in the forest, at the edge of the forest where we lived, and a man stood there; at first he kept his sub-machine gun firm in hand of course, and he didn’t know who he was speaking with. Dad didn’t either, but he understood it was some fugitive, some partisan, so they came to some agreement somehow, and he brought him home to us. And he tested us a bit of course, he left a few times and came back again.”
“I don’t know how long they went there, but it was until they made sure they could go and sleep there. So one night they returned from some operation, and the way it was, the men, the partisans, had women come to them, and they were like their lovers say. And they finished up, and there was also one woman doctor who was responsible for the radio set. And they came back, and of course they went to lie down for the night in the barn, tired. And one of them, Nikolai, was terribly thirsty. There was a little stream there, so he went to have a drink from the stream. And the Germans were there, they surrounded the whole place and set the barn on fire. So [the partisans] tried to defend themselves, of course they jumped out and tried to shoot their way out. But it wasn’t possible.”
“You know what? Not ours, our [partisans] only stayed in some particular houses, where they found people who they trusted. But then through [neighbours], say with the bread [we gave the partisans], there was a baker, so we did it through the baker. He could’ve told on us a hundred times. And the ticket said bread and so on. So he always gave us loaves of bread without tickets, without anything. Then one of our neighbours, a family, they had [partisans] come to them even to visit, and even to sleep over sometimes. So the groups came like that. But we were some five, six, seven cottages there. And they didn’t go anywhere else from here, just to us.”
“[The partisans] came to us to sleep over, one was strong and big, the other was small - Nikolai. None of us knew their names, so we called them according to their looks. When the war ended, they left. Nikolai, he lived with us actually, he directed the fighting and so on. We had whole groups of people come to sleep over, depending on how many of them were part of the operation, say a railway sabotage, or other combat missions. No one was allowed to speak about it, so it was very hard.”
Vlasta Klačanská, née Košárková, was born on 5 March 1931 in Valašské Meziříčí, Vsetín District. In 1944th her parents took in the Soviet partisan Nikolai Alexandrovich Kuzmin, and from that time the family began cooperating with the partisan group Za rodinu / Za vlast (For Family / For Homeland) and the partisan brigade Jan Žižka z Trocnova (named according to a famous Czech general of the 15th century - transl.). Nikolai organised partisan activities from the Křenks’ house. After the war Vlasta worked at the Tesla factory in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, and after marrying, at Tesla Orava in the Slovak-Polish border region. She went on to work at a library and as a carer at a vocational school. Vlasta Klačanská currently lives in the Department of Social Care of the Central Military Hospital in Prague-Střešovice.
