Věra Smilková

“And we had three partisans staying with us, and one of them was that there Žárský [Karel Žalský – ed.]. well, and they wanted to get to Sirákov. To the border between Jasenná and Liptál. So Dad led them. And because the route led across the mountains, they lent Dad a torch. So they arrived at Sirákov, and there were lights there - electricity, right. So they released Dad and told him he could go back home. Well, but Dad said - Dad told us this - that he’d forgotten the torch there. Except at the time... Well, his life was at stake, right. He didn’t know who they’d meet, and so then Dad, when he remembered, he went back. Except they had some kind of password, and Dad knew the password, so he went back and he called it out, but the chaps had disappeared. They’d all gone to bed already. He told us: If I hadn’t known the password, who knows if I had gone back at all. That’s how it was.”

“We children didn’t realise a lot of things. Our parents didn’t tell us about everything until after the war. We were children, we didn’t even care. Except we did care when Dad went out in the night. Mum would always pray. She’d say: ‘Oh gracious me, will our dad come back? Oh, who knows.’ If he would be stopped somewhere by Germans and if they saw what he was carrying, then what? They didn’t give no quarter for that, did they?”