"We learned this from my parents because there was at the beginning the mobilization in that 1938 year. We were all crying at home wondering if Daddy would be taken to the army. It was terrible, we were little kids. When Daddy came back, we were happy."
"No fun, the adults didn't have that, it was all forbidden. And in the evening they had to black out the windows. Some people didn't have enough food either, so they went around the countryside and everybody helped them when they could. When there were air raids on Kolín, on Pardubice, they had to black out everywhere. As a child, it wasn't easy for us. We already understood that in 1945 it was the end. And we imagined that everything would be rosy. But it wasn't. "
"They took my parents to the cooperative farm. Those who were with the Germans then joined the communists and founded cooperative farms. They brought my dad in the municipal office, kept him there until night unless he signed. That was, they gave the fields, everything, they took the cattle. Everything was put into this cooperative farm. And then my parents, they were already over seventy, they still had to go to work, because they had 400 crowns of pension each."
Růžena Lebedová was born on 13 February 1930 into a farmers family. She grew up in Červené Janovice in the Kutná Hora region. She started school at a time of threat to pre-war Czechoslovakia, and a year later she perceived her Jewish classmates disappearing from her classroom. In the 1950s, the family was forced to hand over the farm to an emerging cooperative farm. Růžena joined Praga company as a worker, soon married and raised two children. After that she changed a number of jobs. Růžena Lebedová died in 2020.
