Dana Zemanová

"When I came to that school, it was still a preparatory week, so I went with a child, maybe to the locker room. On the stairs - the schools were not locked at the time – there was a soldier with a rifle, a Soviet soldier with a rifle and a bayonet. So I'm asking in Russian what's going on, and he replied that he was going to arrest Mrs. Polednova. I said: 'And who told you that, why are you doing that?' The children complained that she was strict. And I whispered to the child, 'Run for the director.' So I kept talking to the Russian and I didn't let him go, he was standing under the stairs, I was on the stairs. The headmaster came, and he told him again that he was going to arrest Mrs. Polednová. And the director told him quite loudly: 'As long as I'm the director, only our police have the right to arrest here, and get out!' He threw the Russian out."

"As it started with the mobilization, [the soldiers] came to us for tomato soup because their kitchen was delayed and they only ate cold food for three days. So my mother cooked an eight-liter pot, we had a full garden of tomatoes and we didn't eat them, so we ate the soup. My mother cooked an eight-liter pot and the soldiers took turns in our kitchen and listened to the radio, which at that time was just a huge rarity. It was a mobilization in the year 1938, so they listened to Munich as well. And the one soldier was sitting on a small stool sitting by the stove when we put more wood in, and he had my little sister on his lap, saying, 'I have such a small child at home, I would go to fight right away.' Because they wanted to fight. Munich was quite a terrible thing. And then the soldiers left immediately, they had to disarm them immediately, the soldiers left… No, they had to return to the barracks, they did not disarm until the fifteenth of March. And immediately there the Germans arrived, fleeing the border in front of Munich from Hitler, but they gave them guarantees that nothing would happen to them, so the Czechs returned, the ones, who had to leave everything on the border. And they moved inland, and simply a family of five lived in one room. There were then two families in that class upstairs, the classroom closed the closet, and one family of four lived in one half and the other family of four lived in the other half."