Anna Schreiberová

„They had their car in our congregation gatehousel. They went to go out, although we all crowded the courtyard and they could not leave. We were such silly children as we did not understand that the police has to be obeyed. We kept saying that we like her and will not give her up. And they could say whatever they wanted and they were about seventy. And they did not take us by violence, they would not throw us away one by one. When it took too long, so the sister from the general council and said: ,Sisters, you have to be reasonable and listen to police. There is nothing we can do. They will take the general superior but we can say goodbye.‘ So they have to come with us into the choir to say goodbye.“

„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.“