"It wasn't quite dark yet, but it was getting dark already. Many people got off the train in Lipník, but not Daddy - my mother and I thought so. So we stayed disappointed and waited in the waiting room because it was winter - January. We waited in the waiting room, and all the people left, and this old man was standing there in the corner. My mother and I didn't recognize him. He was my father. After those nine months of imprisonment, we didn't recognize him! He was forty-seven years old then, and we thought he was someone's grandfather. I said to my mother, 'That old man is standing there, and he, poor man, probably doesn't dare to go home. Someone should have probably come to help him. He is afraid to go home alone.' He looked like an old, infirm man. So I went to ask him if he was afraid to go home, and where he lived, and that I would walk with him and let him lean on me. So that was our experience, me and my mother didn't recognize him after nine months of imprisonment. Neither of us. I still remember him to this day. My father was dying when he was ninety years old, three months short of ninety, and he looked incomparable. He looked like himself, he looked perfect. And at the age of forty-seven, after those nine months of imprisonment, he looked so bad we didn't recognize him."
"My father was very lucky, and he was convinced that it saved his life - my father knew German, but he didn't tell them. He told me that. He didn't tell them about it. He was a Czech, a postal clerk and the Gestapo didn't know he could speak German, and my father didn't report it to anyone. He said there was an interrogator, a note-taker and a translator. And what saved him was that while the translator - because the interrogators were German and the interrogation was in German - while the translator translated, my father was already thinking about it [how he would answer]. The interrogators were talking with each other, and Dad told me that he remembered this one German saying, 'Well, he's an idiot,' in German. And Daddy, because he understood them, knew and could tell from their speech what they did and didn't know. Because the whole group was arrested, and each one of them was interrogated separately. I know that in Daddy's case, it must have been the two Janál brothers, Jan Vávra, a gendarme, and a merchant whose name I have forgotten. Daddy understood what they knew and didn't know from the way they talked to each other. So he said it saved his life. What they didn't know, he wouldn't confess to. And he only confessed to - because he would have been beaten to death otherwise - what they already knew. But what they didn't know, he didn't confess to."
"My father was arrested, I remember precisely, on Hitler's birthday - 20th April 1944. I remember that because on Hitler's birthday, on the 20th of April, there had to be flags with a swastika hanging on every house. Red flags with a white circle on it and a black swastika in it. So that had to hang on every house. That's how I remember my father being arrested that very day when all those buildings were decorated like that."
Magdalena Ženčáková, née Melichová, was born on 10 February 1931 in Košice. Both her parents came from the Czech Republic, but they moved to Slovakia together in the 1920s to work. Her mother, Josefa, worked as a teacher, and her father, Antonín Melich, was a postal clerk. After her father was enlisted during the general mobilization in 1938, Magdalena, her mother and her sister Růžena moved to Lipník nad Bečvou, where the family stayed for the entire war period. Her father joined the resistance during the war. On 20 April 1944, the Gestapo came to her father’s work and imprisoned him in Cejl in Brno, then in Kounic’s dormitories and finally in Wrocław. He returned home in January 1945. Magdalena Ženčáková studied medicine in Olomouc in the 1950s and worked as a dentist all her professional life. In 1955, she married Ing. Miroslav Ženčák, who only with great luck escaped the so-called Kožušany massacre in May 1945, where the Nazis executed fourteen local men and boys. Magdalena Ženčáková retired in January 1989. In 2023, she lived in Žeravice in the Hodonín region, died on 27 February 2024.
