Zbyněk Bezděk

"The first thing they did was to set fire to the private barns and the cemetery. The Germans did it for signalling. When they were going to advance, they set fire to something so that they could move on. My parents were hidden here in the cellar until the battlefront passed over, and us young boys, we loaded two pairs of horses, loaded them with our most precious belongings and fled to this one big quarry in the forest, with horses and carts. The battlefront passed over, and the second day, me and my brother and the boys were there from the family, the second day they sent us an officer, to take us back from there. He rode up on a horse. So we mounted the carts again and drove back, and they shot at us from a cannon from this road here. We thought it was the Germans or something. Our horses bolted, the carts went crashing and this is where we got the last hit. A mortar shell. It killed the neighbour and broke our gate. And then we were home."

(Q: "How do you remember the soldiers of the Red Army?") "Hard to say. The women were in the most danger, or when they were drinking. That was unpleasant. I know we had our girls hidden upstairs. Boarded up. And they had a rope with them. If it came to the worst, they could escape through the window. They raped one girl here. Her father tried to defend the girl, so they shot him. The bloke shot him."

"That was the first thing they suggested. Inconvenient persons that are hindering socialisation will be sent to special military training. We'll make it a military matter, and that way it'll be law. As a soldier, you have to obey and go. Unarmed, to work." (Q: "And had you completed your military service previously?") "I had been in attendance. After the coup, I was in attendance at the officer's school in Bruntál. I'd graduated from the officer's school as I had matriculated [passed the secondary school final exams - transl.], and after military service I went home. And what happened was they demoted us. The inconvenient ones. As part of the persuasion process. So after completing that officer's school I was just a plain private. And I was sent to special training, where I spent five months."

"There was a big old Lichtenstein barn by the estate and the partisans set fire to it, and that's why we were taken as hostages from the village. Political hostages. It was written down that if they continue their activities, we'll be arrested and taken away immediately. As political hostages we'd ensure peace in the village. And we [they? - transl.] arrived at around eleven o'clock in the night, I saw them there in that stream. And when they were going to lead my father away instead of me, I knew things were bad, and I crawled out. They sent Father home and sent me to the Gestapo in Šumperk. In the night, in a truck." (Q: "A why did they choose you?") "Well, they chose a person with a certain amount of influence or of some standing, so as to make him an example to the rest. It's understandable, psychologically, that they won't go around locking up the homeless, but that they'll take someone who has some influence, some support." (Q "How many of you did they take?") "Six I think, and I was the youngest of them. We arrived at the Gestapo station, that's opposite to where Cinema Oko [Eye] is in Šumperk now. Any time I go by I see it. That's where the Gestapo had their central. That's where they took us in the truck. They interrogated us and then locked us up in the penal labour house in Šumperk. That was next to the train station. Czech resistance activists were already being held there, Mr Bednář was there, the teacher. They locked them all up. From several villages. It wasn't only in Rovensko that the barns burned down, it was in Sudkov, in Kolšov. Where the big estates were and where the fires started, that's where they got their hostages from. And some of the hostages were later executed at the Bratrušovice shooting range. Jurka, Otevřel and a few others."