"Daddy, what could he... Uncle Rudolf had his son Ivan right next to us and he was also a partisan. He used to carry these, well, signs, these written things, what you could, what ever you heard, right, so he used to distribute them. Our mom always expected, you know, what's the..." - "Leaflets with information, what's going on?" - "Yes, yes, yes, yes. I used to keep watch just as I was going to that church, I used to go singing in the choir too. So the nuns were there singing with us, teaching us. I was always checking to see if the soldiers were gone. If they've gone to Bosanska Gradiska, if it's free. Before the road to the other side into the woods to go into the mountains." - "And the partisans came to visit you too, perhaps? How did it go?" - "We were children who were sleeping, and they came just to see what's new, what is it, and they left again, went away again. They went to the village, they went through, they had their..." - "Co-workers?" - "Collaborators."
"The Germans acted badly. They went in thinking there were all people partisans. What's his name... - "Tito's partisans?" - "Partisans, yes. We were Tito's too... My brother just got out of school and went to apprenticeship, but he thought he was going to be a room painter and then the Germans came, they occupied us. So the Germans gave it to the Ustaš people. Ante Pavelić was the main one of those Croats."
"It was first sowed in the spring... The potatoes were planted early in the spring, they were planted in March, as early as February, end of February. The potatoes were planted and the beet was sown, in the autumn the barley was sown. And the barley, when it was in June, the barley was cut and first the barley was boiled, the barley was ground, it was put into the mill, it was ground there and it was made into bread. But mostly the corn was sown. They were always happy with the corn porridge. The cornmeal was boiled and poured with milk, and that was for breakfast, and then it was made into cornbread, yeah. And we'd have it like that in the afternoon and for dinner, it was called "kuruza", and with that we'd have maybe either a fried egg, sometimes we'd have cottage cheese, or we'd have sour milk at noon when the milking was done, so we'd have that milk in the afternoon for dinner and the kuruza and that was it."
Leopoldina Čermáková, née Sochová, was born on 3 October 1929 in the village of Teslić in what was then Yugoslavia (today Bosnia and Herzegovina) to Antonín and Marie Sochová. Her grandparents were from Bohemia, but her parents lived in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina from childhood. She had eleven siblings and her family lived in poor circumstances. From the age of six she lived in the village of Dolna Topolna. She finished her school education after four years in a German school. During the Second World War her family was in contact with the partisans. After the fighting ended, the family moved to Czechoslovakia and settled in Heřmanice near Česká Lípa. Leopoldina Čermáková moved to her grandparents‘ homeland a few months later in 1946. She worked on the farm and helped with household chores. In 1948, she married Václav Čermák and a year later their daughter was born. They lived in Mimoň, Děčín and later in Mnichovo Hradiště. They were not affected by the communist regime. In 2024 she was living with her daughter in Mnichovo Hradiště.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
