Ludmila Šimíčková

"When [priest Antonín Huvar] came to [Velká] Bystřice in the year sixty-ninth, he had to put the parish in order. And also an interesting observation. I was still with a man from Odry, the planner, because it was known that it was somehow neglected, so they went around. And that was the first visit, and before [Priest Huvar] moved in there, the trucks went ahead with materials, bricks, sand and such. The first reaction of one of the parishioners, he said, 'I don't know, I guess he's some kind of a fool to send the materials first and then move in.' But then, he didn't really know anybody there, and it started very radically [repairing]. And it was positive that those who were his friends in Fulneck, Lukavec and so on, they cooperated."

"What an era! Getting rid of people who didn't follow their line. At first they wanted to push us up to those Pastrnkas, up there, but the road was muddy, it wasn't any paved sidewalks, no rocks. Dad said, how am I going to walk there at night? Then they dropped it, I don't know what year it was, but they wanted to evict us on the one hand, but then they wanted to get rid of the office altogether. And because mom was disabled and not employed anywhere, dad was disabled, so it was a very difficult time, but it was very fortunate or by divine intervention that a neighbour stood up for us. What would they have done with us, after all, they would have blamed us for being destitute, so they left him there. Maybe that's also because dad lived for the mail, that was his great love, but of course he did it very honestly, so there was a guarantee that they probably couldn't have got any better there."

"It was a sad time for those people, for those German settlers. But it is true that there is a priest from there [Vražný] who is in West Germany at the crossroads towards Jeseník, we are still in contact with him. A rare person. And he remembered, he was about five years old when he left, that they concentrated them somewhere near that crossroads at midnight somehow, and from there they took them to Suchdol to the train, they loaded them into wagons, but they were not like we know now. They were mostly open wagons, or ones that were probably not quite ready for people. And it happened that, for example, in Germany, when they came, they stopped at a station and some of the wagons were stopped and they went on. So people from one village, he even said two years, were looking around before they found out where they were stationed. And their arrival was perhaps even harder than the parting, because the Reich Germans didn't accept them. They regarded them as Czech Germans, or vice versa, because their mentality and ours, those who lived in the vicinity in those Czech villages, was actually almost the same."