Věra Burešová

“Dad had a good reputation at work, and so after the war, when the banks and the Sudetes opened again, he was given the offer to choose if he wanted to go to Jablonec, Teplice, and so on. That he should choose where he wanted to work as manager and establish [a new branch of] Legiobanka. He came back in the evening, from Teplice I think, and I heard him tell Mum that he couldn’t work as manager. That he’d rather work as an ordinary clerk. They had taken him down under the bank. There were piles of jewels and money on the tables, looted. They had stayed in the Sudetes after the Germans and Czechs that had been deported. And he didn’t want to have anything to do with that. So he went to the central office of Legiobanka - later Živnobanka - in Poříčí in Prague. He worked at the desk there. A friend of Mum’s expressed surprise that Dad had been a manager and was now employed as an ordinary clerk. Mum said that he might be just an ordinary clerk now, but he maintained his convictions. Because some people rushed straight to the Sudetes for the loot.”

“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.”