Vlasta Moravcová

"We were going to the post gradual school once in a week by train. The school was in Votice town, but we had to get off the train in Olbramovice town and walk to Votice, because there was no train station. We were almost in Olbramovice when the engineer called: ´Everyone get off the train, the planes are coming! Those were the so-called ´Hloubkari´, the allied fighter bombers who were destroying the tank engines. And he was right. We all rushed into the field, some to the right some to the left. We lay down to the ditch. And the fighters destroyed the tank engine in deed. It stayed on the rail and we didn’t continue to school, because we would have been already late anyway. We didn’t know the way back on the road to Sedlcany. So we walked back home by the rail track. We walked all the way from Olbramovice to Sedlcany."

"The Germans also killed one girl here at the corner. She was walking to school and they didn’t manage to stop the tank and ran over her. There is a memorial board hanging at the city hall. Everybody who died here is written down there. You can also see this little girl’s name Tancibudkova. She was from Trebnice village and went to school here in Sedlcany. I think she was two years younger than me." What about the other victims? "Well one of the other victims was some Mr. Jaroslav Brozek, you can see his photograph at the cemetery. He lived in Sedlec or Prcice village and he stood against the tank. It was during the 1945 when the Germans were leaving already. But they wanted some revenge so they shot him. But this was rather a boyish act, to stand to the tank."

"The reason why we could stay here through the war was that the factory where my dad was employed remained here and so did the employees. We lived here for two years. Here in the civil zone behind the church. We moved in here in 1943. Then at the beginning of September I began to study the last year of the school in the local vicarage. The Germans were all over the town square. They also made us move out of our house. We moved into an assigned house down the road here. The house isn’t here anymore though. It belonged to some Jews named Chobotsky family before they got transferred. So we moved into an empty house and with us another family named Cech´s. This family ran a grocery store for the civilians. You could purchase everything in this store only for the meal coupons. When I finished the school I didn’t have any job yet so I started to work as a shop girl at the local private butcher’s. I was serving the German soldiers there. Everyday at four o’clock they would come for the potato goulash. Nobody wanted to go and serve them, but I was only fourteen, but I didn’t understand them anyway."

"There used to be a crossing gate on the way to Pribram town. There was a German soldier guarding and who wanted to enter the town must have had an ID." And where could you get this kind of document? "Our parents arranged the IDs for us. There was a police headquarters here in Sedlcany town square because not far from here - in Nalzovice village- was their military training center. All the way through the Sedlcany hollow was their training field. And here, on our town square the commanding officers had their offices. Other than that the main SS-headquarters was in Benesov town. Here was the regular kind of soldiers I would say. It wasn’t exactly pleasant to live with the Germans. Some of them would look at us with anger some of them not. But they were rather polite, in general. My mom worked for them. She was their housekeeper. She said that some of the soldiers were very poor and young boys who didn’t know where they have been sent to. They had no idea where Sedlcany town was."