Jiří Švejdar

"We used to go to Luck to the cinema. Among other things, they screened four parts of Tarzan. I was quite a wild child, so after a while it occurred to me to imitate Tarzan. I took a long pointy knife and left for the woods. I climbed a slender tree, got it swinging to and fro and then jumped to the next one. And so on. So I got through the whole forest, it was about 380 metres wide, just along the treetops. Of course I had to rest. And I didn't fall once! Not once. It was an American film, but I can't remember who played in it or anything."

"We moved to Hrušovany in 1945. I was given my own estate, so I started farming. But then they forced us to join the JZD. That was in 1952. You see, my wife was ill, so she couldn't work. And they didn't even give us milk for the children! Add to that the fact that they wore one of my horses to death and broke my tractor. I left the JZD after a year. I tried to manage on my own for another two. In 1955 I fled to Lipkovice. Simply said, I legged it. They skinned me something awful."

"The Russians wanted to transfer some nine of the better-off families of Boratín to Siberia. According to them we were kulaks, because we had a mill and an apothecary in the village. They wanted to make our church into a warehouse, later into a cinema. Dad was a shareholder of the local mill and of the apothecary, so we were supposed to be among those marked for deportation. They even had three wagons ready for us. But because the Germans arrived, then luckily it didn't happen."

"There were four Germans from the SS who came to our church every Sunday. Fara, Trzeschinka, Bochniczek, and Rudolf. That one was German through and through, he couldn't speak Czech. The other three were from mixed marriages. After church they always stopped by our house for lunch. We distilled some ten liters of liquor for Rudolf to send home to Berlin. One time my sister was sick with typhoid and they happened to visit. Dad told them: 'Don't come in, we have typhoid here!' But Fara came in anyway to have a look at her. He sat down next to her with a thermometer, he measured her temperature, got in his car, and drove off to Luck. He brought some injections and sat with her for two hours, waiting to see if her temperature would go down. It did, so he went out into the courtyard and called out: 'Mister Švejdar, victory.' "