Josef Srkal

"I'll tell you about my dad, he was with the Red Army. They took part in drilling, but my dad and Mr. Novák wouldn’t touch a gun because they were Christians. So they were to be shot as defectors. Their superiors said that war is war and that this wouldn’t be tolerated. So they were to be shot the next day. They lay at night and in the morning they were supposed to be shot. Novák had a dream in which they escaped the shooting, survived and returned home. My dad too, he had exactly the same dream. In short, in the morning, they were taken by three soldiers who led them to a ravine about a kilometer away, where they were supposed to shoot them. Instead of that, one of the soldiers told them to run away. He somehow distracted the other two and my dad and his friend ran away and they couldn’t catch them anymore. They hid somewhere and arrived home from Suchobezvodnej. They both grew massive beards and turned themselves into terribly old man. Old man were not drafted to the army and thus they sat out the at home."

"Some were dropped off Žatec or Podbořany, but we drove up to Bochov to such wooden buildings, where we moved in. From there, we were searching for a place to live. So we ended up in Tašovice. In Tašovice, we took a small farm with six hectares. My dad made a living as a tailor and me and Láďa cultivated our land. When they came up with the collective farms in 1948, when Gottwald won, we quickly got away from there, since we didn’t want to end up in the kolkhoz. We moved to Stachov. From Stachov, we then went to Podbořany."