“I went from the courtyard to the woodshed to pick up some logs and suddenly I saw a group of nine Germans coming. They were armed. I didn’t know what to do but I knew I couldn’t run and that I had to act like nothing was going on. So I went to get the log, I picked it up and slowly walked back to the house. I knew that there were three of those Russians sitting in the back room. I closed the door behind me and I said that the Germans were coming. I opened the window and all of them jumped out and ran off into the dense forest. Meanwhile mother went to meet the Germans. They were just entering the courtyard. Mother was asking them in German what they wanted and they said they were looking for partisans, escaped prisoners and such filth. My mother was asking with surprise what partisans were and that she saw no one like that around. She struck a conversation with them and offered them warm milk for breakfast that she just milked the cow… and they accepted.”
“In 1943 the first soviet soldier came to us after escaping from the prison camp in Nürnberg. He was a lieutenant named Burmistrov. He found our forest cabin, my father was doing something outside and suddenly a man came to him, starved, torn up, dressed in old army uniform remains, and his first words were: “Give bread.” ”
“Father was first sentenced to half a year but the prosecutor appealed against it, said it was too little and he got a year. We were never told officially the exact reason why he was arrested. But we had our suspicions. The Vlajka member was interested in the so-called human hunts that were happening after the war and he supported that, as the president of the national committee. But that was when my father was already against it. The Vlajka man knew that we could still have some guns at home and we did, we had them hidden in all kinds of places and they found them during a house search and so that was the reason why they arrested father.”
“When February 1948 came we, former partisans, were invited to join the KSČ based on Gottwald’s notice. We came to the interview for joining the party and guess who was the committee president… The man who was a Vlajka member during the war and that my father helped so he wouldn’t go to prison. Another committee member was a man who after the war could never forgive us that we had never told him about hiding partisans during the war. He felt like he was deprived of his little piece of fame. And now he was representing the KSČ. When my father saw that he said that he’d never be in the same party as those people and that we were going home. So we got up and left and that was just the beginning.”
Zdeněk Rerych was born on the 4th of June 1931 in a lodge called Obora near Pacov. His father was a gamekeeper named Osvald and his mother was Marie. He had an older sister, Věra. From 1943 till the end of the war the family hid eleven Russian refugees and saved their lives. The family risked a lot had the refugees been discovered - their house was frequently visited by SS officers whose headquarters was in Proseč, a town located a mere kilometre away. After the war they received a recognition for their bravery but after the Communist Party took over in February 1948 they were persecuted. The reason was that both Osvald Rerych and his son Zdeněk refused to join the party. Zdeněk’s father was arrested and sentenced to one year of prison for gun possession and he himself was unable to go to university because of his bad background profile. After his father’s imprisonment he was even expelled from a vocational school where he wanted to take his secondary education final exams. He was eventually able to study at a university thanks to positive references from work. In 1963 the popular Soviet magazine Ogoňok published a report about the Rerych family which led the rescued partisans and their families to contact them. Until that point the survivors did not know the identity of their rescuers because the family was keeping it from them during the war for safety reasons. Most of the rescued refugees visited the Rerych family after 1963 and so the family could learn more about their lives after the war.
