František Kusmič

“Most of us were moved to Huzová. They moved us in 1948, in August. They came and we didn’t have to move a thing as they brought some prisoners from Mikulov and they loaded everything on the trucks. I was well acquainted with a local policeman and he was with me on my yard. And I told him: ‘I’ll take the manure as well. And those bushes, as they are’. I said I’d take everything. And he said: ‘Franta, don’t fool around, you’ll have enough wood there’. ‘But it’s mine.”

“There were also Poles. Two of them escaped, but the Russians caught them when they wanted to flee to Finland. They tried to flee across the taiga, and you know, in the taiga, there were those little houses and they took one yeanling there, because they were hungry. And the Russians reported that they lost a kid. And this is how they were caught. They brought them to our camp. In the camp, there was such a well, a dug out in the ground. Inside of that dug out, there was water and these poor guys had to be in that water all the time. They were kept in that hole. Sometimes, they would let them out, but they treated them terribly. They beat them up frequently with a belt. It was terrible, the way the Polish Kapos treated them.”