“It was hard to get a job. I was fourteen, fifteen years old when I finally found employment. I was babysitting a kid, but then I got diphtheria and had to move to my uncle in Prague. This uncle was my father's brother and I worked in his store. They had been millionaires in the period of the First Republic already. I was penniless. The parents of the child that I had been babysitting were afraid because they thought I could infect the child. My uncle's wife was Jewish. She had a sister whose name was Kautsky. Their son, Oldřich Kautsky (* 24th April, 1906, in Prague, † 22nd November, 1980, in Prague) wrote the screenplay for the fairytales: 'Salt more precious than gold' and 'The proud princess', but he was to be included in the subtitles until 2000. During the war his name was cut out and the communists didn't list him either. His parents were very kind people. In Prague, I couldn't go anywhere till I reached age 18. It was my uncle Kautsky who once came home and said (my aunt was his sister): 'I bought a ticket for Růženka and we'll go to the concert'. That's how I started to go to the Prague concerts. My aunt was a Jew and she wasn't allowed to go anywhere. So I had to stay at home with her. In the evenings we would play cards.”
“I remember the Germans dragging the prisoners of war from the front-lines. They went on foot, without shoes, bags wrapped around their legs, in the winter, frost bitten, hungry. They were about 100. They put them in the barn, while the Germans took the best rooms for themselves. One prisoner was shot by the Germans when he wanted to take one of the potatoes a housekeeper threw to the pigs. Our people didn't leave him laying there, they buried him secretly behind the cemetery and marked his grave with a cross. Once, the cross got knocked off and my mother wanted to repair it but it was impossible to weld it back on. She longed for the cross to be back there in one piece. We used to walk around the place. We bought the forest and the mayor had arranged for the cross to be installed there again. Just last Saturday I was there with my son and now on Saturday with my granddaughter. It used to be overgrown with grass but my granddaughter surprised me because they put a bench there, cut the grass and arranged the place so that I can sit there. There were two prisoners staying at our place. One was American, the tall one, the other one, who was little, was an Englishman. The girl in the photo is me and next to me is my husband. The picture was taken after the war. When the Germans were leaving, they took them along again. They were leading them over the fields so that people wouldn't see it. Those who weren't able to walk on were left in the ditches. The prisoners had to walk for miles. They walked to the border with Germany. The border wasn't that far, almost behind Louny. That was on May the 9th.”
Mrs. Růžena Ničová was born on 14 May, 1923, in Brandýs nad Labem. When she was seven years old, her mother died, and since then she lived alternately with her grandmother in Brandýs and her uncles in Litvínov and Prague. In Prague, she met František Nič whom she married. In 1945, before the end of the war, they moved to her husband’s parents in Jedomělice, where her husband František joined the guerrillas. In 1950 they moved to Slaný. She became a widow and lived in Slaný with her grandson.
