"The station was far away. It was Senkevychivka station. So they took our stuff from us to the gamekeeper's lodge. My dad had a sister there, so we moved there with my grandmother as well. Although the house was half bombed, it didn't rain on our heads there and we could wait for the transport. From there, we'd go to the station, with our stuff. How I got into the carriage, I don't know. Then in that carriage, I remember that there were a lot of us. Six families and everybody was carrying something. Especially duvets, they made these chests for it. There was food, laundry. My stepmother, they had a son in February. So he was, he was six weeks old or something, so it was my mother on top of all the stuff piled up with him in the duvets and me and my sister and my stepsister were moving around amongst the other people that were there with us. But there were more of us kids there. Haken's children were there. I don't know about the others now. But there were more of us. In the middle of the carriage was a little heater, what they called a drum, an iron one. It was used to heat up, well, it wasn't tea. It was more like heated water. The horse and the cow, they were in separate carriages. There was Daddy, he was on guard. So, when the milk came out, Grandma would bring it to us. When the train stopped, at least the milk was there. The bread was baked in advance. I remember that. But the ride, I remember that it was terrible. We used to call him Machine-Führer. From time to time, the engine driver stopped the train. Something just broke down and train stopped moving. So we'd be standing in the woods. He'd go and knock on the wheels and say in Russian that it had broke down. And at the same time, the other one was collecting bread, smoked meat, and bacon as I’ve heard. So people gave it up and then the train worked again. So we started moving, and when they ran out of supplies, the train would brake down again."
"In other villages, like Michna and Český Malín. You must have read about that. In Michna, my mother had a sister Růza, who was married, and they had a two-year-old daughter and a mother-in-law. When the Germans invaded, they murdered them in the kitchen including the little girl and her mother-in-law. They were hiding under the bed, but the little girl was crying, so they started shooting. My uncle hid behind the stove, so he survived. So that was horrible. That's when my mother died also, probably in the summer that year, because that aunt, Růža, her sister, was ironing my dress for my mother's funeral, and later that year, the Germans shot Růža with her daughter and her mother-in-law. I remember the funeral. And we had a cemetery behind the school. Miloš was the one who wanted to fix up something there, having been there twice, so that some kind of a memorial would remain."
"As far as Rychnov nad Nisou. There we unloaded from the railway carriage. We had one horse and a cart, so Daddy put it together and drove it to the camps. And before us, there were Germans in those camps. So they moved us in there and there were, I don't remember anything else, just the bunk beds, no closets, nothing. We used to have lunch in a former factory, or it was still a factory, and we used to go there for snacks as well. But we didn't like it. We weren't used to that kind of food. It was still mostly German women who cooked there, and they had their own way of cooking compared to us. We received salami, and we weren't used to that. We were rather fond of sausages or smoked meat. The bread there couldn't last that long, so we received bread as well. There were some cattle from Rychnov in the woods. There was a village there. And thanks to that cattle nearby, we received some hay for the horse and the cow. That wasn't enough, so my sister and I used to go into the woods to pick some grass. We called it 'psice'. It was sharp and it could cut your hands, it was kind of dry. Well, it was, let's say, the end of April, it wasn't even green. So that's what we did for the cattle. And then we'd dig. There were, we called it, treasures taken out of the factories. Bijouterie. So we were digging through it. When I think of it today, how dangerous it was to dig through it... But every stone from a ring or something like that was precious to us. You could even find a ring. After a long time, we were very happy because we left everything in Volynia, little things like that. Not even Christmas decorations, we hadn’t taken anything like that. It wasn't worth it. It would break."
Růžena Pospíchalová was born on 18 January 1939 in the village of Novosilky in what was then Volhynia. She was born in the territory before the Second World War when it was strongly influenced by the tensions between the Polish, Ukrainian, and Czech populations. During the war, she was targeted by the passing troops of Nazi Germany, the soldiers of the Soviet army, and the rampage of the Ukrainian Banderites, the local rebel army. Her dad, Alois Kozák, fought with the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps, the so-called Svobodovci, in the Battle of the Dukla Pass in 1944. Mummy Alžběta Kozáková died when little Růžena was four years old. Until her father’s return from the war, she and her sister Emilia lived only with their grandmother. In Novosilky they experienced first-hand both the aforementioned rampage of the Banderites and the passage of the German and Soviet armies. The Nazis murdered part of her mother’s family in 1943 in the village of Michna. In April 1947, the rest of the family was relocated to the old homeland on the basis of the Czechoslovak-Soviet relocation agreement on the post-war resettlement of Volhynian Czechs. Unlike other families, however, they haven’t received any farmland, so at first, they had to stay in the former Nazi concentration camp AL Reichenau in Rychnov near Jablonec nad Nisou. Just before their arrival, the camp had functioned as a prison camp for forcibly deported Germans, whom the Volhynian Czechs had even met there. German women cooked lunches for them. Eventually, her father received a farm and fields in Kunratice, where he and his family farmed for some time before moving to a farm in Raspenava near Frýdlant in Bohemia. Dad resisted joining the JZD (communist agricultural co-op) as well as the Communist Party all his life. Růžena Pospíchalová was not able to continue her education after elementary school and had to work in the forest. At the time of the interview in 2023, she lived in Raspenava.
