“Some time after Christmas the door opened and a short man entered. My dad asked him: ‘How may I help you? Oh, why, you are Mr. Pick!’ He was wearing prison clothes and he carried a can with water. My father said: ‘Come into the apartment.’ He stepped in. ‘How come you are here, Mr. Pick?’ We knew him, because they owned a large company, they produced clothes, and they needed things from the joinery workshop and they had been coming to us. He came into our kitchen, he sat down and he was shaking. With great pleasure he ate breadcrumbs from the breakfast which were left on the table. My mom prepared coffee for him. ‘Mr. Pick, how come you are here?’ ‘I came from Auschwitz.’ ‘Mr. Pick, who saw you?’ ‘Nobody. I need you to help me get to the neighbouring village, I have friends there.’ ‘No. Since you came here, you will go to our attic, and you must not go out, because Germans would shoot all of us.’ He went to the attic. There was a double ceiling there, which was originally used for storing grain. ‘You need to go there and my wife and I will think about it and decide what to do.’ He hid inside there and he agreed with my mother that they would not tell anyone about him, and so it was. We were bringing him food there, and mom gave him a duvet and a pillow and dad installed electricity for him there. He endured it there from the beginning of the year until May.”
“In the evenings I would go over the island to the Tyrš building, we were meeting there, you know, we were young people. Russians were here after the war. We always walked there and we walked back home at night, too. One day three Russian soldiers got out from some bushes there. There was a group of us, girls and boys together. The Russians got out and said: ‘Davaj panenku!’ (Give us the girl!) The boys, my brother among them, as well as the older boys, stood up in front of us and we girls ran away. They talked them out of it and they eventually parted on good terms. But one day I was sitting by the window at home and I was sewing and a Russian man came there. His unit was stationed in the pub. The soldier said: ‘Girl, come with me!’ I told him: ‘Are you crazy?’ and I continued sewing. He grabbed his gun and as I was sewing by the open window, he fired and the bullet flew past me and got stuck in the ceiling. I shuddered, and little bits of stones were falling from the ceiling. The soldier ran away into the pub to his companions. When dad found out about it, he went to the pub and said: ‘A soldier who wanted to kill her just ran in here.’ The major ordered all of them to line up and he said to my dad: ‘Look at them and tell me who was it.’ He was probably hidden somewhere. That’s how it was. It was in summer, it was warm. They took off their uniforms and they were jumping into the Elbe River naked. It was a shock for everybody here, because nothing like that was practiced here. They were used to it.”
Libuše Pleskačová, née Bendlová, was born on July 10, 1926 in Nymburk into the family of cabinet-maker Jaroslav Bendl and his wife Marie. She and her younger brother Jaroslav were actively involved in the management of the business and the workshop. They were also members of the Sokol organization. In February 1945, the Bendl family provided a shelter in their attic for Jewish man František Pick, who had escaped from a death march. They were hiding him until the end of the war. Mr. Pick later settled in Israel. Libuše studied a household school in Kolín and later in Nymburk, and she gained her first work experience as a seamstress in the first years after the war in a Prague fashion studio in Paris Street. The Bendl family cabinet-making business was nationalized by the state in the late 1950s and Libuše’s brother subsequently became the manager of the workshop. Libuše married a man from Jablonec and she moved there, but their marriage was not successful and she later returned to her parents and she became a clerk in a glazier’s shop in Nymburk. Ten years later she married again and with her second husband Oldřich Pleskač they had a daughter in the same year. The Bendl family received part of their property back in the restitution process in the early 1990s.
