Ing. Ivan Kudělka

“Please, you now hear - Polish food, Polish food. What we experienced back then with Polish strawberries, you don´t want to believe it. In a town of fifteen thousand inhabitants eight hundred people were infected with hepatitis from ice lollies flavoured with strawberry shaved ice from Poland. It was not just Jeseník, it was also South Moravia, Eastern Bohemia and it was horrible. The hospitals did not run as usual, many wards had to be cancelled to have place for people suffering from hepatitis. They gave them bananas and ham to eat. Imagine that they increased our rations in Jeseník but it was not enough. So, we restricted the sale of ham to twenty dekagrams per a person because also people who were not suffering from hepatitis bought it.”

“There are deep forests over the railway station and partisans resided there. I don´t know if it is true, there was an electrician, superior to those who mended the public lighting, the electrical network. There were his two subordinates, electrical fitters. One of them perhaps joined the partisans and he had a girlfriend, she brought them food. Their commander was a Russian who had parachuted during a partisan landing. And two young soldiers, Germans, arrived in Nový Jičín, they returned there from east front. They told them that there were partisans in the forest. Well, partisans... But they took off to look for the partisans there. They were cunning and assumed that the girl might have been going there to see them and followed her. But the partisans were not stupid, so their commander was hiding at the edge of the forest and waiting for the Germans. He killed them with an axe.”

“My father was a reserve sergeant, he was a renowned soldier in the regiment. The day of mobilization, they woke me up in the morning, my grandmother was at our home, my mother´s mother, both grandmothers were there. Women were crying, father was packing his familiar military trunk, it was a wooden case with a name on it. You could also sit on it, he packed some clothes. We accompanied him to train. It took at least half an hour on foot. The railway station is in forest.”

“We cooked sauces a lot. We had home-made cream. We cooked onion, chives, garlic, of course tomato and dill sauces. We also cooked pasta or dumplings a lot, we cooked so called hairy dumplings and greased them with pork fat. Even though there was the war I was never hungry because we had a field. There were seven of us at the table during the war, grandmother, and grandfather and five of us - three siblings and parents. That was the reason why I had to work in the field since I was a little child. Because we would have found someone to work in the field during the war but it would be in exchange for food. We could not afford it when we were seven who ate, we did not have excess. They were benevolent with us and gave us two meat tickets in the municipal office. We sent one to my godfather to Prague.”