Josef Kuthan

„There was one stupid thing about it: as my grandfather, grandmother, my mother and aunt, they were still little girls at that time, evicted by the Germans during the Second World War, the farm was completely abandoned when they returned to it. And then they took, she offered - it was the American United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) - which offered favourable loans for farmers. So my grandfather took a loan from the UNRRA to buy cattle, because there was nothing at all. But then, after the coup, these debts were transferred to the bank Česká spořitelna. And when they had to leave the farm in 1951, the debt remained with them. Česká spořitelna kept collecting money from my grandfather and grandmother. And I remember, grandfather died in 1962 and then my grandmother, she died sometime in 1992, and when I disposed of the papers and such after her, she had a bunch of receipts from the post office in the drawer, where she paid the debt until 1976, one hundred crowns per month. Until 1976.“

„From 1943 my father was sent to Germany for forced labour, and in 1944, I don't know exactly when, he managed to escape from there and returned home here. And here, because he knew the region perfectly, he was quite close with the people here, he knew a lot about the region, so he got involved in resistance activities, in the partisan group Fakel, which operated here in Dobříšsko. But my father was not active in any combat activities, but his job here in that guerrilla organisation was... his job was to be the messenger. First of all, he knew the region perfectly from his work, from the state administration of damming streams, and he knew many people here. So he tried to somehow help and connect the individual articles of the Dobriš partisan organisation and find food and medicine and what needed to be done at that time.“