Oldřiška Šicová

“When they took over our country in September, when the Germans came, the first thing they did was that they picked up nearly the entire list of candidates who ran for the last election into the village office in Souš in 1938… Daddy thus could have already been in prison at that time. He was (I don’t remember it myself, but I remember that mom said that it took a long time) there for six weeks and then they released all of them. The pretext for their arrest was that they had set flags with swastikas on fire… They used this pretext that these people (because they were members of the communist party who ran as candidates for the village office back in 1938), that they had set the flags on fire and they claimed that they had done it. I only remember dad’s return. We, children were playing in the yard, and there was a large gate, and suddenly, in between the gate…my daddy. I ran to him over the whole yard. He brought me a chocolate.”

“One might say that it is an exaggeration, that lives were at stake. But at that time, it was really so, lives were at stake. Even for trifles. If Germans had seen it that way, then… I don’t mean all Germans. No. They were not all the same. Dad had a colleague at work, for example. He was a German, too, and dad always used to say: ‘If every German was like this man, everything would be well.’ And he had more people like that. My God, for we lived there, all of us together.”