Marie Krieglerová

“I remember a moment when they carried in a Russian soldier. They were all young boys. They laid him there on the straw and he was just groaning. I thought that I would bring him something to eat. I brought him some eintopf they had there. I brought the food to him, fed him and asked him if he wanted anything else. ´Vodka, vodka, vodka!´ I brought him water. At first I didn’t know what vodka was. We didn’t know it. He grabbed the cup and poured the water out and threw it on the ground. He said: ´Vodka!´ This time I somehow understood him and brought vodka to him. That’s what they were receiving. ´Spasiba, spasiba!,´ he was thanking me. He wanted something else. I went to get it for him, but when I returned, he was dead.”

“They released him from the concentration camp just before the end of the war. When he returned, I wasn’t at home, I was in Zlín. So Dad wrote a correspondence card saying he was home, so I came back from Zlín to Šaratice, but I couldn’t recognise him at all. I was looking forward to it so much, and then when I saw him sitting behind the table, I stopped in the doorway and didn’t budge. Dad was kind of a heavily built person, and the man sitting there was quite the thing. He weighed about forty kilos. He was wearing trousers from the time when he was strong, and there it was, hanging from him. So he got home in the end.”

“There was a school in Šaratice, which they turned into a hospital, where they took all the soldiers from the surrounding area. They put out piles of straw, and the soldiers all lay there injured. There were lots of them, and they ordered us girls around twenty to go work in the hospital. Their commander lived in our house - he was a reasonable chap. I told him I was supposed to go there and that I was afraid because the Ruskies raped women. And he said: ‘I’ll give you some advice, you mustn’t wear a skirt, you have to wear trousers.’ They couldn’t stand trousers on a woman, even their own women soldiers didn’t have trousers as a uniform, they all had skirts. ‘So if you wear trousers, no one will notice you.’ And he was right.”

“In Jestřebí there lived one man who worked in Jáchymov after the war. But he wasn’t interned there, he was working there of his free will. He was a young man and he worked really hard. He wanted to build himself a house or something like that. He earned a lot of money there. He was there until 1953, so he had worked there for a long time. He returned to Jestřebí, because he was originally from there. He had the money and he planned to build a house there. But then came the currency reform and he lost everything. All this terribly hard work had been in vain. He got insane. He stayed in Jestřebí; he still had his mother there. He didn’t hurt anybody or anything like that. He lived at home for along time. For example, he would... Opposite the school there was a high-voltage power line, with those huge electric masts. And he climbed on top of them during the fiercest of storms. I still feel the horror when I think of it. He was climbing on the mast and he didn’t fall down. Bolts of lighting were everywhere around him. He was doing things like that. His mother eventually died and he lived in the cottage alone. People wanted him to go for psychiatric treatment. He had a brother there; the brother even served as the mayor and he was a communist. They wanted to get him to an asylum, but nobody was able to catch him. He wouldn’t listen to them. Eventually they persuaded him and they managed to get hold of him. They broke into his cottage; there were two beds inside. He kept a dead roe in the bed. He slept in one bed and had the roe in the other. The stench was allegedly so horrible that they could not handle it.”

“He was very lucky. He always used to say that it was a miracle that they released him before the end of the war. He was a pious man, and he always used to say that his release before the end of the war was due to the intercession by Virgin Mary. At that time we did not live in Litovel anymore. We lived in Šaratice, and so he came to us to Šaratice. The released him on the condition that every week, or every month, he was to report to the Gestapo. He came back in a pitiful state. When they arrested dad, I was fifteen, and I moved to Zlín to work in the Baťa factory, where I spent five years until the end of the war, and when dad returned home before the end of the war, he wrote me a postcard telling me that he was at home and asking me to return. And so I arrived home. I was standing in the door and dad was sitting behind the table. I was looking forward to see him, because we hadn’t seen him for five years, but I remained standing in the door as if thunderstruck. I couldn’t recognize him at all. This can’t be my daddy! My dad had been a strong-built man. But the man who returned was so different. Terribly emaciated. I simply was not able to recognize him.”

“At the time they arrived the front line was in front of Brno. Fighting was really underway in those villages and the places around Brno. There was shooting and there were airplanes flying. All this bombing was terrible. To put it short, people were being killed there, and we were in the cellar and we could only hear what was happening, the noise and the horror of it. We were squeezed in, because our neighbour didn’t have any cellar, and his family thus came to hide in our cellar. A child was even born there to our neighbour. It was horrible. I was sitting in the corner of the cellar on a pile of sand which was prepared there for storing vegetables in winter. I was sitting on the pile of sand in the corner. I was twenty at that time, and I still remember that I prayed desperately: God, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I’m just twenty. I know that I was scared in silence, because it was really terrible. The Russians had a katyusha placed in our garden. They dug a two-meter deep hole, and they were shooting from those katyushas from our garden. The noise was terrible, and everything was falling down – the windows, and everything, was smashed by the blasts.”

“In this terrible time, when my mom was alone, my sister got cancer. She had to lie in bed for two years or even longer, and my mom had to take care of her alone and endure everything. My sister eventually died. At that time my mom didn’t even know where dad was. That was in 1942. We didn’t have any news of him. When he then returned from the concentration camp, he asked us where Liduška was. Mom wasn’t even able to tell him that she had died, that she was dead. She told him: ´Dad, wait till the evening, we will go to her.´ Dad calmed down. He thought that perhaps she was somewhere ... like the girls who worked as house servants somewhere else, or something like that. Well, they walked to the cemetery. Mom used to tell us about it – he had literally collapsed on her grave. My parents were really wonderful. And I don’t think I could ever had better parents.”