Ludmila Švandová

"I saw him a week before it happened. He was leaving, I was coming from a meeting, he was at the bus stop, and we just said a quick goodbye and he said, I'll be back in a week. A week later we were waiting and suddenly somebody rang the bell, it was late in the evening. I said to my daughter, oh my gosh, Pavel has arrived, I'm going to open the door and there was an SS man and he just asked if we had Pavel's son and if we knew where he was. That hadn't been confirmed yet, so we waited all Sunday in suspense and on Monday morning we found out what had happened. After that we lived in fear all the time because we were afraid that something was going to run us over, that something was going to happen. I used to walk from those Vávrovice, it was a road between the fields, and every time a car came behind me I was really scared, I thought, now I might get hit. It was a terrible time, difficult. He committed suicide, they told me. But the investigator in Blansko, we were there with his girlfriend, Anicka, and he said, look, it's a State Security thing, but you mustn't tell anyone. I'm only telling you as a mother and fiancé, but you mustn't tell anyone that I told you."

"I was eighteen years old and I was placed in a settlement village, Jakartovice was the name of the village. The conditions there were very wild. The school that I got was in very bad condition, the windows were broken out, taped with cardboard, the door frames, it was completely rotten, it was bulging like that, the door couldn't close, the floor was torn up and I had forty-eight children there. We didn't have water there, we had to use a perch to pull water out of the well, the conditions were difficult. There were still two young teachers who taught at the primary school, it was a national school then. One of them and I lived together in a little attic room, we had nothing there, two beds, a table and a closet that couldn't be closed, there wasn't even a stove. Then we got a stove, but we didn't have any wood, it wasn't easy."

"Then there was another raid. Behind Lasák's mill there was another mill, Klevet's mill, and behind Klevet's mill there was a meadow that was municipal, it belonged to nobody. Romanian soldiers settled in that meadow, they had horses there and some of them stayed in that mill. There came this one raid and that's when we were at home, my mother and us children. I know we ran along the wall into the cellar because the shrapnel was flying up to our yard and now it was pounding around us, we were so scared, but we got into that cellar happily so no shrapnel hit us."