Věra Burešová

“After graduation, Karel Eisert suddenly came up and asked me to make a first aid kit. There wasn’t much to work with back then. Some powder for wounds, peroxide, boric acid, but he mainly needed bandages, cotton wool, and plasters. So I prepared it for him and he came to pick it up. Then he visited us and begged me not to tell anyone about it. My dad already knew what it was about, and he also stressed that I shouldn’t tell anyone about the first aid kit. If the Gestapo caught word of it, they’d murder both families. Who was the kit for? A group of partisans had been airdropped near Louny. They had a doctor with them, a Russian lady, and their commander was Lieutenant Vasil Kish from Carpathian Ruthenia. They were deployed near Louny by mistake. I don’t know exactly, whether Chrudim or Čáslav. So they were in completely foreign territory with no idea where they were. But the gamekeepers, Czechs, found them out of course. They knew Mr Eisert, the wholesaler, and they told him about it. He took them food, and he also needed a first aid kit for them because they were beaten up.”

“They came in March - the German inspector - they took all the boys and assigned them to work in the North Bohemian Coal Mines. The boys didn’t graduate. Two eighth-year classes of the Louny grammar school. Each class was left with some fourteen fifteen girls. [Q: You were in the year born in 1924, which was sent to forced labour.] Yes, but we graduated normally. Whereas the boys didn’t. They took them away in their final year and sent them to the mines. They liked the thin ones the most because the lignite mines only had a ladder leading down. There weren’t any technical amenities yet. So they were in the mines, with accommodation in a pub somewhere. The boys said they were given a piece of hard bread and some watery milk.”