Jindřich Novotný

"Veba even had an amazing sound at that time, they were the so-called strikers. Some of the spinners worked very fast and in large numbers, and they also had bigger payouts. They were written about in the newspapers and so on, in short it was the so-called strike movement. One of these well-known strikers was Emilie Šulcová or Anna Vacková, she was the best ever. She had about fifty looms, with the participation of other women co-workers. In short, Veba's strike movement was a model for other co-workers. Sometimes Zdeněk Nejedlý, the Minister of Education, appeared in Veba, so that Veba was - Veba cotton mills - Broumov, Zdeněk Nejedlý's mills."

"I remember them running on the road, the Germans were running from the Russian army from Germany, there from abroad, as if from today's Poland. Well, I remember that they also drove such poor people, and they were probably prisoners from concentration camps and labour camps that were in Germany, so it was also so sad. And the fact is that our people were again so kind that they gave them to the poor people who were driven, I remember who had anything to eat, that they were given something to eat. The guards who led them, the poor people, they more or less even tolerated it, they didn't have it anymore... They already knew that it would be bad for them, so they didn't even prevent it. And I was looking at this from the window, for example."

"And then came the year 1945, the great powers decided that all the Germans, the fascists, who were guilty in various ways, those would be deported to Germany. There were trains here at our station, guards from Prague also arrived, they were the so-called RG, the Red Guards were called that, and they were guarding them. From the city, they took German residents to the abandoned camp of former French prisoners and concentrated them there. And after a while they always took a certain transport to the train at the station and from there the transports went from Broumov to Germany. I remember that we were like little boys, when I wasn't going to school yet, so we went there to the field and looked towards the camp, I don't know why we went there."