Marie Škrlová

"Our guys used to go to the dome to ring the bell when the Russians came. I remember that everything was surrounded, there were tanks everywhere. There, as there were gravel pits, from the Church of Our Lady of the Snows, it's still military. There was a sign: Lenin get up, Brezhnev is crazy. It was written in Cyrillic, letters like that. There were signs everywhere, I remember that, and guys used to go to ring the bell - I don't know if at eleven or twelve - on the tower. And then there were background checks and the guys had to be fired, unfortunately."

"And when they were to tear down the statue of Masaryk, which was erected in '36, of course my father was among the initiators of that erection, and of course when the decree came... Yeah, when the war came, he was a gendarme. So he voluntarily retired, saying he wouldn't lead Czech people in chains. So he quit his job, did some menial work in the municipal office. And when the statue of this Masaryk was to be taken down, they arranged to take it at night, they took it, it was in February, I think, they took the statue with the permission of Mr. Provost Lochman to the parish. They buried it there, there were, like the barn now, you know, it was full of straw, full of hay and everything, even my old grandfather used to put straw there. So they buried it under that straw in one corner, because it survived the whole war. They broke the plinth at Moravia, so it looked like they broke the whole statue. Unfortunately, it didn't live to see the statue built, the war was more or less over by then."

"So my dad was first locked up in Kounic's dormitory in Brno, when we went to visit him, they wouldn't let us kids in, only my mother. No, first he was in Garňák in Olomouc, we went there too, but they didn't let the kids in, only my mother. In Brno in Kounic's dormitories, too, only my mother, and from Brno they took him to Wrocław, Wrocław in Poland, Wrocław and Breslau during the war. And then it was only after the war that we learned that whoever got to that Wroclaw, they never came back, that it was just the last stop there. And actually in February they arrested him and in November they executed him."

"I remember when they came for my father, it was here in the kitchen. There was no road, no sidewalk, it was all muddy, that was in February. There was a black car parked on the corner, and three men in fur coats got out of it, they wore these black fur coats. And during the war, how many poultry you had, if you had ten hens, five, ducks, and everything had to be reported, because it was rationed. And my sister and I would go, this was in the morning, to school and my mother would look out the window and say, "Here come the hens!" And of course we had more hens than we had reported and we hadn't hidden them. And we hid them where the bathroom is now, right across from us, they don't go to close the door right now. So we had this closet in there without a window, so we always stuffed the extra hens in the closet and they just, being in the dark, they didn't even cluck, nothing, they were quiet. But then when they came, the Gestapo, then my mother, my dad was in the garden and he came to open the door for them, but right at the gate he had to raise his hands and right away he was groped to see if he had a gun. And mama said, "That's not it, they're not chicken-keepers."