“On the road above Kocanda we could see them advance and shoot. We ran home and a motorcycle with German soldiers arrived to tell us that the Russian army would be there in five minutes. These slant-eyed soldiers came on horseback. It was horrible. Our servant Květa was at our home and a Russian was drinking there. We ran away and hid at the Valenta household. But they were looking for young girls, dyevushky, so we ran to the trinity. They threw the man into a well in the basement but we managed to escape and hide on top of a small cottage.”
“When the Gestapo came to arrest people I walked to school on foot. And when I was crossing the street here next to the grocery store to Šofrová, there was our teacher Tomečková, who wanted to marry Háječek. I told her that the Gestapo was coming to arrest people. Háječek was at her home and managed to escape to Jedlí.”
“My uncle Dominik was locked up in Mírov during the Communist era. He was a priest from Veselí nad Moravou. He was imprisoned because someone accused him of reading out a pastoral letter. They put him to Uherské Hradiště and later to Mírov. So during communist times I would travel to Mírov again. Then he was interned in the Želiv monastery. In 1951 my second father died and my mother was desperate and didn’t know what to do, so we (with her mother – ed. note) went to Želiv. We arrived and the wardens looked like murderers. We met at the church and they had a five-point star there. When they were leading him there he put his finger up to his mouth so we didn’t say anything. It was a former chapel and they sat him down on this small staircase. One warden sat to his left, one to his right, and a third one behind him. But we were crying, we couldn’t talk to him. Ten minutes passed and they said we needed to leave. Uncle begged them, said my mother’s husband had just died and that she was lost. They at least let us talk for a little while.”
Žofie Kubíčková, née Neugebauerová, was born on 20th November 1931 in a family restaurant, Kocanda, located on the periphery of Písařov. Her family suffered greatly both during the Nazi and Communist rule. Her father Osvald joined the Wehrmacht and never came back from the war, the family still does not know where he was buried. Her step-father Emanuel Krobot joined the partisans and spent several months hiding from the Gestapo. Žofie’s mother spent two years in prison in the Small Fortress of Terezín for connections to the partisan movement, her cousins Alois Černíček and Jiří Smrčka were imprisoned in Mírov for the same crime. Shortly after 1948 Alois Černíček escaped arrest and fled from his university, subsequently managing to cross the borders to the west. In 1950, the husband’s family in Písařov saw their brush factory confiscated, the mother’s family restaurant met the same fate.
