Anna Schreiberová

„According to what people said the guerrillas came to a pub and just killed three policemen. There was a whole pub full of people and everyone saw that. They simply came in without any notice or explanation, came in and began shooting, each of them took one officer. My friend and I were coming back from needlework. In winter my mum sent me to learn sewing. We came out of the house and did not know what happened. It was all in the area of Vranová. The village was split into Lhota and Vranová. We went from Vranová to Lhota. It was just a few steps from the village. We went along the street and bumped into the shooting guerrilla. Why did they take the road? Because they flew to Lhota to the police station, where they wanted to tie up all the Czech officers not to call the news further on and they had a chance to run away. So all they wanted was not to say anything, but we did not know anything yet. Our friend took us into the house, because she figured that it may be serious. And then we learnt the truth. In a moment a man came to the house and told everyone what happened in the pub. So we understood who they actually were pointing a revolver to us.“

„We learnt that the nuns were attacked in a house and taken to a cottage. There they were violently dress to civil clothes and sent to their native villages. Then they could not come back anymore. There were many educated nuns amongst us and we knew they wrote a request to the president and around six institutions to pledge for protection for us, who work laboriously in factories. So it was all over. They probably did it wrong. It was likely to be done altogether. The church secretary was then called off and nothing alike has ever happened to us.“

„I think two came to us. I was just cleaning my brothers´ Sunday clothes. They came saying all men have to go with them. So I left my work immediately and put them some bread into their pockets as I did not know where they´re going. Daddy hid in a forge. An officer saw his and said to my mummy: ,If your husband does not come right here, we´ll shoot into the house.‘ When the officer left around the corner, mum begged daddy to come out, that they´d shoot his children. Poor dad was scared to death, but did eventually go to the square. There were at least five hundred men, as they took anyone from thirteen years and lined them up for the machine guns. Daddy had his house with two floors and upstairs in one of the flats lived a teacher, whose husband went too. Next to us lived an aunt, whose husband shot himself when Hitler marched into Olomouc. He was an officer and could not stand the shame of being occupied by Hitler. My aunt´s seventeen years old son (Jan Jirauch), who studied in Brno, but got an acute rheumatism so had to lie in bed at home. An officer said that unless he stands up, he shoots him in bed. So he did and was shot in the garden.“