"[My mother, when she heard what was happening in Český Malín on the 13th], was so scared. She grabbed my hand and we immediately went to the burning Malín to look for my brother. But we didn't find him in the Czech Malín, so my mother and I went to the Ukrainian Malín. There we found him at school. That was also an experience that makes me sick to my stomach when I think about it... When my mom saw my brother lying on the ground with his head smashed in, she fainted and I didn't know what to do. I was so sick of it, but I didn't know whether to cry for my mom or cry for my brother. Then again, I don't know what happened. Mom's brother, who lived in Kneruty, which was a village about a kilometer away from Malín, came there in a ladder truck to get my brother, loaded him up and took us to his yard. There, my mother washed my brother, cleaned him up, and I watched it all. We buried him with a quick burial in the Czech Kneruty. We were in a hurry because we were afraid that the Germans might attack Kneruty as well."
"They didn't do anything. They were handing over the supplies they were supposed to hand over at the time. Some grain, some poultry and so on. So they complied with the Germans and had no reason to be afraid, so most of them stayed at home, but the Germans drove them out of the houses in the square and then divided them into women and children and men. They herded the children and the women into the Ukrainian Malín, and they locked them in the church, poured gasoline on it and set it on fire. The men were herded into the Ukrainian Malín. They locked them in the school, poured petrol on them, set them on fire and threw grenades. But the men, who were a little bit physically able, smashed the windows and escaped. Just behind the school was a large wheat field with tall cherry trees. A certain Mr. Uhlíř was badly wounded and simulated death. He smeared himself with blood, and the Germans were with him, kicking him and thinking he was dead. Somehow he managed, I don't know how, but he saved himself. My brother, because he was eighteen years old, he was a handy boy, so he escaped through that window too. He was crawling in the wheat. But the Germans were sitting in the trees with machine guns, and they saw him crawling, so they shot. He got hit in the back of the head and it took out a piece of his forehead, so you could see his brain. That's what I remember, because that's what I saw."
Libuše Nidetzká was born on 28 September 1933 in the village of Sukowce (Sukhivtsi in Ukrainian) in the Dubno gubernia in Volhynia to parents Justýna and Vladimír Čech. The family owned a small farm and a mill in the village. In 1941 the father died. This left Justýna Čechová alone with two children, and she became an easy target for various armed groups of men moving around the region. In March 1943, fearing for her life and the lives of her children, she decided to move in with relatives in Český Malín. But four months later, on 13 July 1943, Český Malín was occupied by German soldiers. They unleashed an unimaginable inferno in the village, during which 374 Czechs were shot and burned. Justýna Čechová and her ten-year-old daughter Libuška survived only by chance. The next day, however, they had to bury their 18-year-old son and brother Vladimír. On that day in Český Malín, the Nazis also murdered the uncle and aunt of the witness Bedřich and Marie Činková, her cousin Maria Cimalová and her one-year-old son Jindřich. Libuše and her mother then lived for five months with relatives in Kneruty next door before moving to Podhájce to the farm of Josef Uhlíř, whom her mother married. In 1947 the family emigrated to Czechoslovakia and settled in Nový Malín. In 1954, the witness married Otto Nidetzký. After graduating from medical school in Olomouc, she worked as a dentist in Vizovice, where she and her husband lived until 1966 and where their daughter Libuše and son Jiří were born in 1955 and 1960. After the death of Josef Uhlíř, the mother lived alone in Nový Malín and it was because of her that the Nidetzky family moved to her house. She then worked as a dentist in the children’s dental department in Šumperk and then as a dentist for the employees of the Czechoslovak State Railways until her retirement. At the time of filming in 2024, she was the last living witness to the tragedy in Český Malín.
