František Vejvoda

“We used to have our meetings in a nursery school where my mother’s cousin had been a nurse in charge, and that’s where we experienced all this. We went to pass the test of bravery to the forests. We had to mark a cross on a specific spot to prove that we were there and then return back. Then we went on walks and trips all the way to the Kunětice mountain castle. And I have one ‘beautiful’ memory from there. We were cooking soup in this hollow and suddenly some young boys appeared above the hollow, a little older than us. They were from the Hitler Youth and they were approaching us slowly. Suddenly their commander appeared, shouted at them and we were free. So that’s a memory from our childhood.”

“My father got the worst of it because he got sick and died shortly afterwards. He couldn’t stand to watch it because they had taken it away from him twice – during the occupation when they had stored aircraft engines here – and then the comrades took it away from us. And from the playground that we had had, they made a school canteen instead. They fenced us in, we couldn’t even go there. So, the size of our property diminished. Today we only have the main building and a little courtyard where I have one garden bed and that’s it. Everything else now belongs to the school. When we asked for it they told us we weren’t entitled to it because it had been seized back in those times. It had been nationalized and expropriated. And the school built their canteen on an expropriated land.”