Josef Řepík

"After 1945 Czechoslovak military expedition arrived to Český Malín. They took some of the mold from the common graves and entrusted my father to deliver it officially to Czechoslovakia. They filled in a galvanized tank or two with it. They it went to be handed over in Košice town."

"On the third day my father and I were going back to Malín. We left the horses and everything else in the woods and went back alone. As we were approaching we walked through the burnt as we passed through the gardens and yards. We returned home. Our barn and cowshed were burned down. Our sheep were closed in the shed - managed to escape when the gate burnt and fell down. They (sheep) were burned; their skin and fur on their back was burned. Our dog looked the same. Later on when the thunder storm came the dog crawled behind the kiln and nobody could get him out of there how he was scared. There was a kitchen with the stove. My grandma was sitting there as she couldn´t move well - they pinned her. She was seventy seven or seventy eight years. They (the Nazi soldiers) shot a duck and as my grandma was lying on the bench there they put the duck under her head. That´s how the boors used to deride the poor dead old people. At the end they threw the grenade into our house; luckily it didn´t set the house on fire."

"My mother and sister were burned in the neighbors Dobry’s house. My father found pieces of their clothes and part of my sister´s leg - only her foot from her ankle down with the shoe on it. He showed it to me back then and I still remember it well."

"My uncle - my mother´s brother - stayed with us too. He built a shelter with my father in the basement of Novak´s family house. From there they dug a tunnel through to our well. That was our shelter. Later on as the front line approached, we all went down there. We had food and everything prepared for us for few days there. Everything happened so fast - our horses and animals stayed in the farmyard, the horses were still harnessed in the car. But when we got out of the shelter everything was gone. There were neither horses nor animals. Germans took everything with them. They met Russian soldiers about twelve or thirteen kilometers from here and most of the horses from our village got killed there. There was one or two horses left in our village but those were the ones the Germans didn´t want anymore."