Stanislav Kostiha

"If I may say, we had it set up interestingly. He brought the text, my wife typed it on a cyclostyle typewriter. He had cyclostyles, of course, on the sly, which was somehow not allowed, these reproducing machines. After the typing, I did the proofreading, and when I found that there were typos or something, I marked it. My wife re-glued it with special varnish and re-stamped the letters right. So then when the parish priest got it, he had it ready to go, just put it in that cyclostyle and multiply and multiply. When he'd multiplied it, then there was more work to do. We had that arranged, depending on how bulky it was, how many sheets there were, and sometimes there were a lot of us going around the table doing it. But that was in the rectory in this larger room next to the office where some of the things were handled, or when more parishioners got together and so on. That's what they called their church work meetings. That's where we made piles of the copies. That was a big oblong table. Now we would go around that table, and everybody would take the first sheet, second sheet, third sheet and so on and practically when it came to the end, if it wasn't so bulky, if it was up to something like 60 pages, that's 30 stacks of sheets, it was one batch to staple it or bind it if it was bulkier. My wife also wrote texts that were over 200 pages, so it had to be done several times. It was fun at times. A lot of fun was had. And it wasn't just me and my wife and the pastor, but there were more of us, some friends, some trusted people from the church and so on."

"During the Heydrichiad in 1942, [my father] hid one of the paratroopers, paratrooper Pechal, who was accidentally dropped by parachute not into the Protectorate but to Slovakia. When they found out, they decided that everyone would somehow get themselves into the Protectorate. But then it happened that one of them came into conflict with the Czech gendarmes. There was a shootout, and he was also wounded, but most importantly, he left some of his documents at the place where this happened. So then they managed to trace him based on that. And this one Lieutenant Pechal got as far as Ždánice and rang the parish, and my father hid him there. There were two of them, my father and the chaplain, Father František Voneš. Then, unfortunately, when the whole event was revealed, and they came to the parish to arrest the paratrooper, they arrested my father and the chaplain, of course. They were taken to Kounic's dormitory in Brno, where they were shot on July 1, that year 1942. My mother managed to escape in a very interesting way. When they rang the bell there, an elderly lady who used to go to the parish, who was also arrested because she was disrespectful to them, to the Gestapo who came there, answered the door. She died in Auschwitz. When the Gestapo wanted to find out where the parish priest was, she sent them up. They went upstairs, and she [mother] jumped out of the window in the mezzanine into the rectory yard at an unguarded moment and ran through the garden to the forest, where she hid for several days and then reached... Not several days, but that day and the following night, and then she reached some acquaintances whom she thought she could trust, and there she was hidden for a while. Then they found her a more permanent and better shelter in Lovčice in a house, and there she survived the whole war until 1945."