Naděje Dlouhá

"During the war we already had a large wood gas tractor and after the war a smaller Svoboda tractor. Dad helped people a lot with it and then they helped us again. We didn't have horses, only cows, but after the forty-eighth year, we suspected a neighbor, and they came to take the tractor away. They didn't use it at all because it was too weak for any big farm. We were kulaks, although I don't know what they did, but they took the tractor. The way I see it today. And we didn't have anything to pull it with, because the cows couldn't do it, and we had meadows as far as the dam in Rozkoš. That's where we went through Provodov and Šeřeč and dried hay all day long. Well, the cows had to learn to pull. It wasn't pretty. I didn't have much of a relationship with the farm, but when I left school I wasn't allowed to go anywhere but to the farming school in Police nad Metují. So we used to go there, but when we went to practice, I never went once because I was afraid to go among the cattle."

"The Jewish couple Löwenbach were deported to us from the New Town in the forty-first year. Their parents had a house on the square in Nové Město. The lady's name was Zdenka and her husband had textile factories in Hronov. And when there was a removal, they put the Jews in the village to work. The Löwenbachs slept at my father's brother's house, but they came to our house for food. Of course, my parents didn't demand any work from them, the Löwenbachs were very nice people. They had fur coats, Meissen china, silver cutlery hidden at our place. We had it put on such kind of stove. If the Germans had discovered that, we would have followed the Löwenbachs, they were sent to Terezin in the forty-second year. I remember that, because I went to school the next day and they still took a picture of me. My mother was crying all the time, so I had a bad time too. And my parents used to send them parcels because they were allowed once in a while. And after the war the lady came to us, the gentleman died in Terezín because he was sick with lung disease. She also came to us with her sister, she wasn't displaced because she lived with a Czech. And they came together with my brother, who survived the death march. They arrived in the evening, and I was already lying there listening to the horror. The lady came to get the things. Of course my parents gave her everything as she had put it there. In Nové Město she got their house back, it had been occupied by the Germans, who had to leave it. And Mrs. Löwenbach told my mother to come to New Town. So we went to see her and she offered my mother, because everything was there after the Germans, to pick something. But mom said that she didn't need anything until now and that she didn't want anything from the Germans. So we went home empty-handed."