“About fifteen vehicles with German soldiers came here. Near the church they stayed and rested. Two boys climbed up the vehicle and stole a gun. I was just standing nearby, observing. An aircraft past by and they shot at it from the gun. The pilot has seen something, turned round and threw a bomb exactly at the spot they were shooting from. He shot no one as the boys were already gone.”
“We were hiding with the cows and other people in the forest. Suddenly there was a Russian on a horse. Then there were about two on the second day and they wanted my sixteen years old brother to show them the way. They took him and went towards Kerhartice. One of them was sober and he showed my brother where to run near the deep forest that the others want to shoot him. I fit wasn’t for the Russian, my brother would be dead.“
“Two days without any food or drinks we went to Tábor in a wagon used to transport cattle. There we stayed with a farmer, who was an administrator of the farm in the Czech Budweiser and we were working there. It was the first village after Soběslav. Then we moved over to the farm in Choustník and there were still captured German soldiers. The farmer who voted for the communists, took the farm apart then and so we got to another farm in Nová Ves (near Chýnov) and there we were until 1952. Then my son-in-law went to the municipality and they let us go back, but not into our house and so we got to Nové Lublice.”
Viktor Schindler was born on August 8, 1935 in Staré Lublice (German Alt Lublitz) as the sixth of nine children to Franz and Vilhemina Schindler. Same as the most locals were the members of his family of German origin. Their life was struck by the WW2 and the period shortly after that. Three older brothers of the witness had to join the Wehrmacht. They all survived, but only by pure luck they didn’t end up in a prisoner camp at the territory of the Soviet Union. They never returned home and remained in various occupation zones in Germany. The twins Franz and Erich were divided by the iron curtain for a long time, as Erich lived in a democratic part of the Western Germany, while Franz ended up in a communist GDR. Numerous family due the mother´s illness didn’t have to join displacement, but several times they had to move and finally in 1948 were immediately sent to agricultural works to Tábor region, where they lived under very poor conditions and could return in a native country only four years later. In 1955 Viktor Schindler married Marie Lašová. Her family re-emigrated to Nové Lublice in 1946 from Yugoslavia, where her partisan brothers joined partisan unites and participated in fighting Nazi Germany and where Marie Lašová after being shot by splinters of a landmine almost lost her leg. Viktor Schindler died on 11 August 2019.
