Ivo Rotter

"They did it quite simply. The second Ukrainian front liberated Blansko by riding on those- they didn't have any motorization, it didn't exist, it was just horse carriages, and the soldiers sat in them. So we welcomed them and so on. The fact that they took the watches, that was normal. But they arrived in our neighbourhood and liked our house where we stayed at my mother's sister's house. They liked the house because it was connected to the soda factory. There were a lot of sodas in the soda factory, and when they found an Alpa somewhere, they would mix the sodas with the Alpa and drink it. So it was convenient for them to occupy the house. So they arranged it so that the whole street had to move out, they didn't care where. One soldier stood there, and another one over here. We weren't allowed to go there, but we used to sneak in as boys. We were 14 years old. This Malinovsky came there, he had a truck, so they came there. He had four women who were like proper women. They were the telephone operators. No beds, he didn't have that. They brought about twenty carpets, which they piled on top of each other and slept on that. And we boys saw it all. Malinovsky, that was a man as big as a mountain, and he yelled at them. Nobody dared to do anything there. I know the ones with the green caps, that was their Russian police. As soon as somebody did something there, I don't know... if someone raped someone or something like that, they would shoot immediately, without a trial, immediately. So I don't remember there being any Russian raping in Blansko because Malinovsky was there. They were downright scared of him."

"The main task of the Defence of the Nation in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm was to ensure the transfer of soldiers who had fled to Poland and later to Slovakia when the Second World War started. And this was their responsibility, and my father, since he had a car as a doctor, also arranged for the transportation of these people. They were either officers or ordinary soldiers who were running away. My father would take them to the border, and they would cross from there. Some to Hungary and some to Slovakia. Depending on which route they took. He was arrested there in February '40 and taken to Uherské Hradiště, where they interrogated him. He was beaten quite a lot there, as we found out later. After about two or three days, on the 14th of March, he was taken to the Kounic's dormitory."

"He was transferred from Ostrava to Zhořelec, to Görlitz, on 28 March 1941. And then for trial on 11 August 1942 to Breslau and on 10 December back to Ratiboř. In Breslau, he was sentenced to three years without parole. Which, of course, he had already served since the arrest, but that didn't help, of course. I'm sure they already knew he was a Jew. That's why he was taken on 10 March 1943 from the Ratiboř camp to Sosnowiec, which was a sub-camp of Auschwitz, where he was beaten with a shovel and died sometime in November, as I learned."