Eduard Steun

"After my father arrived to Literbach, he wanted to familiarize himself with the terrain so he would have an idea of what forests he had to manage. So they were walking through the woods together with the trainee Kroupa. And one day, in a place on the edge of the forest called Zaječí tanec or Rabbit dance, they found shoe tips sticking out of the ground in several places. So they dug a little into the earth and found corpses. My father reported the find immediately to the SNB (National Security Corps – the regular police) and soon experts from Pilsen arrived. They found out that it was corpses of twelve women from the death march from the Svatava concentration camp, which was next to Skolov. It was called Falknov back then. It was twelve women. And they had to be exhumed. So they brought the Germans from Literbach and they had to exhume them with no equipment, even without gloves. They said that it was a horrible stench. It was sort of a punishment for them."

“Back then there was a lot of illegal poaching going on in those woods and it was mainly the soldiers from the Zhůří garrison who were responsible for it. This annoyed my dad quite a bit and therefore he would repeatedly ask them to stop it. But their commander insisted that they had nothing to do with it and he altogether ignored my dad. They would come time and again to Zlatá Studna to hunt for deer and other wild animals. They came with their army jeeps and you could hear shots being fired in the woods. This continued until once my dad ran into them while they were loading some deer that they had just shot onto an army truck. It was the very same commander who had previously claimed that they were innocent and one of the cooks – they got caught in the act. After this they became afraid that my dad could start to talk. That was at the very moment when we were about to move from Zlatá Studna to Horská Kvilda. In the attic of the house in Horská Kvilda where we were supposed to move in lived the trainee Kroupa. The evening before we moved in he went for something to his neighbor Předot and he left a burning candle on his desk because he thought that he’d be right back. When he was coming back to the house, he was stopped by soldiers who told him that he couldn’t go back to his house because they were just having an exercise there. When he told them that he left a burning candle on his desk they told him to give them the keys and that they would blow it out themselves. But he wasn’t allowed to go there. It seemed really strange to him. In the end, he spent the night at his neighbor’s place. The next day – they had already arrived with our furniture – my dad was standing in front of the house with the gamekeeper who had lived in the house before. Suddenly, my dad noticed a narrow stretch of dry grass leading from one of the walls of the house to a nearby barn. He found it awkward. So he asked the gamekeeper if they had been digging there for something or what it could be. The gamekeeper had no idea but he just had a hook in his hand so they buried it into the ground in that place and found a wire. They followed the wire to the barn where they found a little box with a switch. My dad immediately knew what was going on and so he contacted the police and a little later some police pyrotechnics arrived and found explosives in the cellar of the house. The house was supposed to be blown up with us being inside. The pyrotechnics removed the explosives and blew them up outside on a meadow. Then, an investigation was started and our moving was temporarily interrupted and we stayed a bit longer in Zlatá Studna. The investigation later revealed that it was done by the soldiers from Zhůří. They did it because they were afraid that my dad would speak about their poaching. Therefore they wanted to get rid of him. I think that the investigation results weren’t communicated to my parents – they never really found out. My dad learned about it from a friend who worked with him at the police in Brno. He then went on to work at the Ministry of the Interior and it was him who gave him this information. He also told him to let it be and to be happy that it didn’t end in a catastrophe. So this is how it ended. But if their plan had worked out I wouldn’t be here today because as the pyrotechnics were describing it the whole building was supposed to explode. After they blew the explosives up it produced a huge crater in the ground of the meadow. And it was done in a very precise manner, everything was camouflaged very well except for that narrow path of dry grass that gave the whole plan away.”

"Those Germans with no post or property could stay there if they wanted. But gamekeepers, foresters, farmers with property, teachers, they all had to leave. But those forest workers could stay. So the people from Zlatá Studna left voluntarily. But they could not take very much of their property with them. They had to leave a lot of things behind. But in 1950 everyone still remaining in Zlatá Studna left. As soon as they left, the buildings had to be demolished, in order to make sure that the saboteurs could not hide in them. And that's how the village of Zlatá Studna was destroyed. Only the pub under the gamekeeper's lodge survived and only for a short while. The Czech National Museum built there what they called a biological station. Usually during the summer, various botanists, zoologists etc. came to explore plants and animals. They went to Mezilesní slať. Especially doctor Hanzák, a renowned zoologist, or the botanist Ivan Klášterský."

"My brother - when he was temporarily working in the Kvilda forest district - was entrusted with the Černá hora forest section. For some time, there was no coach driver for wood delivery. So my brother took care of it and one day, two German women from Kvilda got lost. No-one knew what happened to them, they simply disappeared. Later there came a postcard from Germany with a big diagonal CENSORED stamp on it. In that message the German women thanked my brother for helping them to cross the border. My father went almost crazy; I thought that he was going to kill him. Because if the border guards or the police had found out about it, they would have imprisoned my parents and put us in a home for children and that would be terrible. He loaded them on his cart, threw hay on them and headed for the border, like if he was carrying horse fodder. Later he told us that he had even encountered the border guards. But since they knew him, they exchanged a few words and let him go. They had no idea that he had two grannies underneath the hay."