"I had two problems. In 1956 there was the Hungarian uprising. I was sitting having a beer and I said: 'The Russians have got it in Hungary, the Communists have got their asses in a puddle.' It was working Saturday. I arrived home, the State Security officers were already there, they loaded me up and took me to Žandov. There they stripped me naked, one of them sat with a machine gun against me and interrogated me until morning. That was once. The second mischief was when I sewed on a tricolour in 1969 and was caught by an SS man, a policeman and two soldiers, there at the crossroads to Úšovice. And they said: 'Take it off!' - 'No!' I fought with them so hard that the trolleybus couldn't go."
"Then we moved to Czech. When we moved, we didn't have anything. My uncle, who was sixteen, helped my mother load our stuff into the wagon. And he said to my mother, 'Marta, if I don't like it with those Poles, I'll come to you.' And my grandfather's house, one bomb fell there and there was nothing left of it, the few things he had, they lived with them in the school. He went back to that school and the Poles took everything from him. So he came to Czech in just what he was wearing, he had nothing. When we were in Czech, they moved us in with a Mr. Hellinger. It was a house that had two bigger rooms downstairs and two rooms in the attic. The three of us lived in one room, and across the hall was a woman who had a German soldier musician. My grandfather lived upstairs and the owner lived in the other room and downstairs was a storeroom, so it was a full house of people. And when they [the Germans] had to move in 1946, this Hellinger says, Frau Matička, in zehn jahre bin ich zurück. [Frau Matička, I'll be back in ten years] It didn't work out for him."
"It happened that [my father] had malaria and was in an infirmary somewhere in Germany. I know that we went to visit him by train in 1943. I remember it well because they struggled with the name Matička—they couldn’t pronounce it when we were looking for him. He ended up in Schörner’s army and surrendered in Mělník. There, some smart Czech fellows, who had never held a rifle, were showing off. A shot was fired, and a soldier got his stomach blown open. Apparently, they didn’t pay enough attention, so they were taken out on the spot. My father was captured again later in Poland. They spent fourteen days on a train to Siberia—that’s how it all ended for him. He said that when the grass grew, soldiers would graze outside like cattle because the Russians didn’t have enough food. Every day, thirty or forty soldiers died. A Russian doctor came—it was a huge camp—had them strip naked, and if someone looked like they wouldn’t make it, they were put on a train and shipped off to Germany.
Manfred Matička was born on 14 March 1938 in Husinec (today’s Gęsiniec). He belonged to the descendants of Czech Protestants who emigrated to Prussia in the 18th century for religious reasons. His father fought in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War and was taken prisoner by the Soviets at the end of the war. In 1945, the witness, his mother and other relatives moved back to Czech, settling in Tři Sekery, where they lived for a while in the same house with a displaced Sudeten German. In 1947, his father escaped from a prison camp in Siberia and was reunited with his family. Because of his views on the Hungarian uprising in 1956, he was arrested and interrogated by State Security (StB). During the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, he wrote a protest slogan on his property. In 1969, he got into a conflict with police and soldiers over a sewn-on tricolour. He trained as a chimney sweep, but worked most of his life as a professional fireman in Mariánské Lázně. In 2023, he was living in Tři Sekery. He died on January 12, 2024.
