Milada Kolářová

“But then Bohouš was arrested near Hradiště. It came I don’t know where from, somewhere from the mountains from the partisans there. He was betrayed, he was at the Gestapo. He didn’t tell them anything, nothing about where Kiš was. The Germans already knew about Kiš. But he told them nothing, they put him in the cooler, he suffered terribly, awfully. And when they were at their wits’ end, they put him in a cell, and with him they planted the former Czechoslovak officer Navara from Česká Třebová, who was also imprisoned and couldn’t take any more of it, and so to help himself and ease the pain, he got it all out of Bohouš.”

“Unfortunately, we were betrayed and Bohouš was arrested by the Gestapo, that was under the occupation. But before that, before they arrested him, Bohouš used to come to Mýtka to kill the pigs when we had a slaughter. Illegally of course. Mum and Dad always managed to fatten a hog in secret, and from what was left, well, I can’t really say ‘left’... They gave at least half of it to people in the towns, because people there had it rough. And when one time during a slaughter Bohouš complained that he did not have enough food for the people and that they didn’t have where to hide anymore, Mum told her brother: ‘Well then, Bohouš, when you find out about someone like that, send him here.’ And so Bohouš brought us the paratrooper Kiš and the Russian captive Afanasiy Koropka.”

“Then Mum, me, my sister and also Mrs Říhová, we were all in one cell, but the cell was a big, long room, and there were bunk beds in threes, three bunks above each other, and altogether there were eighty of us there. You can imagine how squashed we were. The first night we didn’t have where to sleep because there was no room in the bunks. So we got a blanket, a bowl, that was a clay bowl, and a wooden spoon. That was our equipment. So we had to lie on the floor. The three of us all on one blanket, and we covered ourselves with the other two. Of course, it was cold, the window had to be kept ajar because that many people needed to have air. We got food. We got soup for supper, it was supposed to be some kind of cabbage soup or what. Well, something that I would never, ever put in my mouth, but I was glad that it was warm. So that was the only thing we ate that day. But at the entrance when we arrived, they wrote RU into our papers, which meant ‘return undesirable’. But then our fellow inmates saw - because there were really a lot of really kind women, really kind women there - so they said: ‘They can’t sleep on the floor.’ So they somehow made some more room in the bunk beds and took us in among themselves.”