Antonín Zapletal

"Slávek, my cousin, was sentenced to death and was being transported to a concentration camp through Brno. In Brno, the train stopped and they were allowed to get out of it. At the same time, there stopped a train carrying inmates from a labor camp in Mladkov. My cousin intermingled with the boys from the labor-camp train. He took somebody's jacket and put it on himself. He had some dark pants and he marched together with the boys to the labor camp in Brno, from where he was able to escape. That wasn't so hard, because it was just a labor camp, not a concentration camp."

"I remember the liberation in Hvozd. I saw the first Russian tank rolling on the street. I think I might have seen Brezhnev in Hvozd at the time when the Russians arrived there. It was a rather thick officer walking around the place, I think he might have been waiting for a telegram. He was rather corpulent, wearing a long army coat – it was an officers' coat, made of leather. I believe it was him because the inhabitants of the nearby villages – Svitavy, Litomyšl or Polička – they remember that Brezhnev was here at that time. I'm sure it was Brezhnev. He was in the camp that the Russians set up behind Svitavy. After the war, they found out that he had travelled through this region. That's how I came to the conclusion that it was him, that I had seen Brezhnev."

"When I was a kid, I knew how to make some extra money. I bought blueberries from the other kids and then re-sold them in Haná. I had to walk to from Hvozd to Haná – it was quite a long walk. I made around five crowns on the berries, which is some thirty crowns in today's money. The way to Haná would take quite a while. I walked through the forest, through Modrá hvězda. I think that the forest might have been some five kilometers wide. I came out from the forest and then I saw the rolling hills sweeping all the way down to Haná in Loučka."

"I was a liaison and I walked up to the guard. I didn't know that he wasn't one of us but a member of Vlasov's army instead. It was dark and he spoke Russian, so I took him for a partisan. We walked with him – me, him and one more guy. I didn't know that he was pointing a gun at me. I turned around and he used that opportunity and fired at me. The other guy ran away, leaving me there."