"Nobody was allowed to build the houses in the original place of the burned ones. That was decided in Prague. The basic plan was laid down by the Minister of Agriculture Ďuriš. Two companies started building it. There was a tender for this, one company was Baťa and the other Frolík from České Budějovice. They said, 'There will be five cottages in the field.' But the state built it. People didn´t build it on their own because no one had money, nothing. Those people didn´t even have anything to wear. I didn't even have shoes - the neighbour carried me away without shoes. My mom sent me to them to look after me, and when they were running away, the neighbour grabbed me and I didn't even have shoes. People only had what they were wearing that night."
"My parents survived the horror in our own house, but only by miracle, because as they had built [the house], they had dug a lime pit there and then they hid in it, under the shed. They saw when the SS came to the threshing floor, they had an incendiary stick, which they banged against the machine and threw it into the straw. At that moment, everything started to burn."
"Whoever had found out and could, they fled to the woods. Even then, people had hideouts ready. These were shelters dug in the forest, they were covered with branches and logs - whoever could, they ran away. Myself, I was carried there by a neighbour because my mother had been captured. There, at the spot where the machine-gun fire was going on, she was put at the gate with a young man from Litohošť. They wanted to shoot them both."
Vlastimila Holakovská, née Hrdoušková, was born in April 1941 in Leskovice in the Vysočina region. At the end of the war in May 1945, her village was burned down by the Nazis. It was one of the greatest tragedies at the very end of the war, when the Nazis murdered 25 people on May 5 and 6, including seven women. In addition, they burned down a number of houses. Vlastimila was four years old and she took most of the memories from her parents, who told her everything in detail. She describes how her parents survived the massacre in a lime pit while a neighbour carried her to a hideout in the forest. Her uncle Alois Hrdoušek died in the massacre. She also recalls the post-war restoration of Leskovice.
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!
