"Then 1953 came. As we were sitting here in the garden - there used to be a big pear tree here - we wer served an eviction order at five PM, and at six the next morning a truck full of militiamen arrived and they took us to Potvorov, sixty kilometres away from Plzeň. What they didn't steal on the way, they broke when they threw it off the truck. Three pieces were left from the living room. There used to be my mother's Petrov grand piano where the TV is; they rocked it and knocked it off the truck. Really, what they didn't steal - paintings and what not - they smashed when they threw it off the trucks. I went to a technical high school, my dad worked as a warehouseman at ČSAO (car repair shop), and we had to get up at three AM because the train stop was almost 45 minutes away from Potvorov. When the creek below the railway line overflowed in the autumn, we took our shoes off, tucked up our skirts and trousers, and crossed it."
"My mother told me: 'We were friends with the Germans, life was good. But when Hitler came, I was even scared to go shopping; they would break our windows with stones. When the borderland was occupied, we couldn't even get back; people were fleeing with rucksacks.' Dad got a car, so we drove here and stayed with grandma at the farm in Božkov because there were tenants here. Then air raids started and half the people in our street would hide at our place because our cellar was supported with struts or what it is called, like they have in mines. There was shooting and bombs hit the Kolešovka hillside above Božkov, because the Germans had their flak there, and our entire house would shake."
"My grandfather was the mayor of Božkov for thirty years. His obituary said: 'When a young progressive peasant took over as the mayor, the first thing he did was build a road from Plzeň to Božkov and plant it with lime trees.' Until then, Božkov had no real road. Then he started to build a road from Božkov to Letkov, but the swift Letkovský brook, the little trickle near the chapel, tore it down. He had the stream canalised, built a road, and finally connected everything with a bridge across the Úslava River. The bridge was there until the 1980s when it was demolished and a new one was built. He also had a school built. It was the first school in Božkov, it is still there today; it served as a national committee and library and now it is empty."
Eugenie Kubalíková, née Saková, was born in Plzeň on 28 October 1935. Her grandfather Petr Egermaier served as the mayor of Božkov, which was later annexed to Plzeň, for 28 years. Eugenie’s father Jindřich Sak was a criminal police inspector in Planá before the war, and the family had to flee to relatives in Božkov after the occupation of the Sudetenland in 1939. As a member of the Social Democrats, he did not agree with the party’s merger with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia after 1948, which is why he was demoted. As a result, the Saks were in the ruling regime’s sights and were also aggravated by neighbours’ denunciation. Due to this, Eugenie’s mother Anna Saková was put on trial for allegedly “swearing at the Communists”. In 1953, the Saks were evicted from their house, likely as part of Project B (for ‘bourgeoisie’) and not allowed to return until after three years. The witness was not allowed to go to university for cadre reasons, but having graduated from a high school of mechanical engineering she joined the locomotive works of Škoda where she found nice colleagues and interesting work.
