Helmut Bartsch

"They came at night. Someone suddenly started banging on the door. It was the main commissioner from Uhelná who came from Ostrava and with him a soldier. Suddenly they were banging on our door. Nobody ever told us why they came and what they wanted. They just said to my dad: 'you're coming with us'. I witnessed it all because I slept in the bedroom as well. My father had trouble getting up from bed because he was recovering from a serious war injury. For that he was punched in the face right away. My mother protested a little. She said: 'What's going on here? He didn't do anything wrong'. The Commissioner spoke German. He said: 'Setzen Sie sich, or I'll shoot you'! So they took my dad away and me, my sisters and my mother, we hid in the forest. We were afraid that they might come for us as well. It started to rain, so I went home to see if the air was clear. Nobody came for us anymore."

"Next to our field was a large meadow and the English played football there, especially on Sundays. When we played there, especially throughout the war, we had nothing – no ball to play with and no chocolate. But they had everything. They received from the Red Cross meat cans, chocolate, everything. We came to the meadow and they had two balls. They would always borrow us one ball and played football next to them on the meadow. Sometimes there were some guards, sometimes not. There was one youngster named Gerhard, and there was an old guy, too, about sixty years old, but he didn't go there. They didn't want to flee anyway. Why would they try to escape? They only worked in the woods for a few hours a day and they were given good food there. Once we proposed to them to give us one of the balls. One of them said: 'all right, but we want some eggs for it'. I said: 'no problem'. At home, we had chickens and our neighbor (Hauke, note by the author), they had a much larger homestead and many hen. And the younger son Bertig, who still lives in Germany today, he collected the eggs. So the hens no longer carried eggs. We collected the eggs and buried them in the garden. When we had enough of them, we went to the English. But they were not on the meadow. So we went down to the camp. We came to the camp, there was such a courtyard and there we found them dribbling with the ball."

"They had a few rifles and stood there (the Henlein supporters, note by the author). The financial guards marched along. They were armed and had hand grenades. And when they reached the bridge they stopped them: 'Halt! Surrender!' The two of them jumped into the river under the bridge and before long, one of them (there was Majzlík and Gebauer) threw a hand grenade on the other side. Soon there were about seven wounded by shrapnel. Among them was a certain Scharmannová who had been curious and wouldn't listen. A short walk away, there was a farm, so they took them there for treatment. Their injuries weren't too bad but it was bleeding a lot. As they threw the grenade, they opened fire in that direction. But it was already getting dark. Among them was a certain Hutner, who then spent the next 10 years in prison. So they were shooting in that direction and then it was quiet. In the morning of the next day, there lay a dead on that place. He was shot in the head and the other one fled."