Cyril Michalica

"He was caught in the front and told how it was. He said they had a machine gun in a small town in the Ukraine. The machine gun was elevated somewhere, on a church, and he said there were so many Russians coming that the machine gun got overheated. That they were then captured when the machine gun got overheated by constant firing. So, then he fell into captivity."

“As a child, I was four or five years, when the dear dad Masaryk – everyone used to call him like that then – died... The postman came and told people that a telegram had arrived at the post office saying that president Masaryk had died. The people – you could see how sad and downcast they were. I didn't understand it very well. And one of them said: ‘Well, now we have something to look forward to, Hitler is going to grow horns, who will put up with him?’ Well, I remember that. And also in the very next six months, already the months after that... He died on 14 September 1937, and already Hitler and especially Henlein, they had already started to do things to break up the Republic. They said they were Germans and they wanted to be part of the Reich.”

“In the gatehouse they assigned work to us, and we had to wait out there even if it was freezing. I don’t understand how we managed to survive it in the clothing we had. Today, if you are properly nourished and you have warm clothes, and then you wait at a bus stop for a little while when it is freezing, you start shivering. The clothing we had there consisted of rough trousers, made from the cloth postmen used for their pelerines, but it was just the fabric without any underlining. It had no pockets and we thus could not keep our hands warm. Then we had a shirt, but without a sweater or coat. That was all the clothing we had. Only when a person went to work, he would be issued a coat just for that particular day. There were no socks, only footwraps, which sometimes had holes, and the shoes were working boots with laces. Before the lights-out time, all shoes had to be cleaned and lined up by the door. You destroyed three rice straw brushes when you cleaned three hundred pairs of shoes. Many men worked at construction sites, and it was terribly annoying having to clean shoes so soiled from construction work.”

“They pressured the farmers to join the cooperative. I was in the Orel Sports Union, there were more of us, and when we saw what was happening after February 1948, we tried to do something against it just like partisans did during the war, because we saw that this was unjust and illegal and there was nobody to appeal to. We were meeting in Tvrdonice. Farmers received notices that they were all summoned to a meeting. Local officials as well as people from the district authority and members of the State Police and the State Security were alternately sweet-talking them and threatening them. In Týnec they managed to persuade several farmers to join the cooperative, then the same thing happened in Hrušky and another meeting was then to be held in Tvrdonice. We thus agreed that in order to demonstrate our support to the farmers, we would set the cooperative’s haystack on fire. The meeting was scheduled for Monday and we set it on fire on Sunday evening. It was on the day of the harvest feast in Hrušky. The meeting then got cancelled.”

“My father did not want to join the cooperative, and they thus took revenge for it. The communists established a cooperative of railway workers, but they did not have anything. We had a nice modern hay threshing-machine which we had purchased during the Protectorate, and they arrived, accompanied by policemen and State Security members and they simply took it away, including the engine. Anyway, as they carried the machine away, their vehicle turned over and they broke it... They destroyed the machinery cooperative, they nationalized it, and they confiscated the tractor and everything else.”