Božena Šálová

"My mother concentrated on partisan activity and passed on various messages - as I was about to tell you that we were going to Vlčková to the Kamenak - so she passed [them] on to the partisans. I remember as a child that my mother didn't want to go to the forest, so she wouldn't be recognized, so she would come with me. She would go on to look at the cows and I had the task of going to the bridge. Under the bridge there was a kind of stone I knew where I put some kind of papers without knowing what they were. There were countless of them. I didn't find out what was there until the Ukrainian partisans came to visit us in 1971. In 1973, my mother was in Kiev to see them, but in 1971 they came to us."

"When [Dad] looked, he said, 'Gee, those are partisans...' and he looked out the window and counted, 'One, two, three, four, five, six...' or however many he counted. We waited to see if they would knock on the door, but there was no knocking on the door. The men and one woman rushed into our apartment. Before they came to our house, before we knew it was unlocked, dad told us to turn off the lights so we wouldn't be seen. So my sister blew out the lamp, and in the darkness we couldn't see the partisans, or whoever they were - we didn't know who they were then - until we were inside. We didn't lock the door, me and my sister. They burst in on us - and this one partisan, or whoever it was, started shouting at us: 'You, that you are Czechs!? You turned out the lights in front of us!' They terrified us. They shouted that we were cowards... And [Dad] said, 'Well, the girls were in the toilet...' and they said, 'You saw us, you turned out the lights!' and they: "You saw us and you turned the lights off." Well, then somehow they got along, but they were disillusioned and angry and we were scared of what was going to happen."