Květoslav Vrtěl

“I was passing through the hallway, and the warden suddenly ordered me, ´Come with me. You’ll clean the rooms and scrub the floors.´ I said, ´My God, I’ve never done it. Not even in the army.´ During my military service I was the room leader, and as such I never had to clean the room. But I knew the military rule: if it’s wet, it’s clean. And so I brought two buckets of water and poured it over the floor… It was a wooden floor. I began scrubbing the floor and the water disappeared. I emptied the second bucket onto the floor and the water was gone again. It was disappearing somewhere. I suspect the ceilings there were made of some clay, and the water ran through it and was dripping from the ceiling on the lower floor. I thought they would kill me. I said, ´I didn’t know about it.´ Then they sent me to beat carpets instead. I placed the carpet over two planks from the fence, began beating it and the planks fell over. They chased me away from this kind of work too.”

“We were outside in front of the building. Four or five of us neighbours were chatting there. Suddenly an airplane flew over us, and one of us says: ´There are some flashes coming out of its propeller.´ It was three days before the end of the war. It was a Russian pilot and he was shooting at us. We jumped for the door. My dad was running along the wall in order to reach the other gate and get inside. The last man who stayed outside because he couldn’t squeeze into the door got hit by a splinter into his leg. The pilot dropped a mine in front of our house. The glass from all windows fell out and that splinter hit his leg and he eventually died of this injury. He was not married. My sister was in the back of the house doing laundry at that time. A goose was nesting on its eggs there and she went to feed it. A splinter flew inside through an opening in the corner, and it just missed her, she managed to grab the edge of the door and get inside the laundry room, but a splinter cut her toe.”

“The Russians were here in the evening. They were back there, they used the place for cooking kitchen there. In the evening my dad asked one elder Russian man: ´What is it like in the kolkhoz in your country?´ We didn’t know anything at that time. The Russians had liberated us, and the atmosphere was full of euphoria. He looked over his shoulder and went away. The day after he came to my dad and again he looked around to check if somebody was listening. He said: ´Listen. Give thanks to God everyday for having a farm like this.´ Father said: ´Well, that’s normal. And how is it in your country?´ - ´It’s not good. If you want a shirt or a coat, you need to go to see your commissioner to get a permission for that. And if you got a nice wife and you lend her to the commissioner, then you get the permission.´ I thought: ´Well, that’s something.´ That was the first time I heard about Russian kolkhozs.”