Zdena Machková, roz. Kubíková

“Some time passed. We had to move out (from Michalovka), because somebody said something and mom found a note under the door that if we had not moved out, then… Auntie who had returned from the concentration camp was already living there with us at that time, and so there were three women, me, and Mirka. They readied the horses and they loaded whatever they could. But what could one carry? Almost nothing. My mom was baking bread, she had just prepared the dough. The clothes were washed and waiting to be hung and dried in the morning. Everything was left as it was and we only kept what we had put on, and we ran to Rovno. It was not possible for us to stay there, and eventually we thus stayed in Kvasilov a little further away. We arrived there without anything; we had nothing. One family, Mr. and Mrs. Jelínek, lived there, and they provided a small room for us, about the size of a goat sty. The five of us were surviving there. Without food or anything else. In order to have something to eat, my mom and my older aunt were going to the dumpsite and gathering potato peels and things like that so that we would have something to eat. Everything turned out well, because some woman then gave her a goat and later we bought a little pig. We spent one year in Kvasilov living in this way. When life became better, an order – or rather an offer – came that families could follow their husbands and move to Czechoslovakia. We thus packed everything and loaded it onto train cars. From the journey here I only remember that the door from the cattle car opened and we sat in the open door, swinging our legs and singing Czech songs. I don’t remember anything more.”