"And there was Dad and Mom in the basement. They stayed in our house and hid down in the cellar. Then they heard chained shoes walking around the hall, (German soldiers) were stomping their feet. They kracked open the door to the cellar. There was a door to the cellar... The cellar was quite steep and the stairs were quite high. The door got stuck, so they didn't bother to do anything about it, so they left. "
"It seemed calm to them, nothing was happening. The car drove right past and they saw them (the parents). Dad jumped behind the pole, pulled Mom there, and her leg remained outside. They (the German soldiers) threw something at them, either a grenade or an armored fist, and it tore her whole calf off."
"Some people were somehow connected to the guerrillas. Maybe there was a walkie-talkie that they had a walkie-talkie there. But it so happened that someone there, probably from a pub in Lejčky, to the retreating crowd... it was the army on May 9th. It so happened that someone fired out there."
Lidmila Kocourková, née Lhotková, was born on April 29, 1936 in the small village of Lejčkov in the Vysočina region, where she grew up on a family farm. At the end of the Second World War, the witness and her siblings stayed with their grandparents in nearby Pořín. Because of the cattle, her parents decided to return to the farm in Lejčkov, where they witnessed a tragic event. On May 9, 1945, retreating German troops were attacked. At that time, the locals watched the expulsion of the Wehrmacht and watched for Red Army units. German soldiers murdered 24 civilians and burned the village. The witness’s parents were hiding in the basement of their house at the time of the attack. In time, they left their hiding place, but the shrapnel from a grenade thrown from a passing German car seriously injured her mother. Fortunately, she survived the attack. Lidmila and the rest of the family hid in a shelter in the woods near Pořín. After the war, the village was restored. The witness lived in České Budějovice at the time of recording (2016).
