František Janáček

"They turned, came to the yard, got a Stand at ease and rushed to the gamekeeper´s cottage, in a group of three or four. The guys also pierced the duvets. They crawled under the bed, strewed hay on the floor without any remains, manure in the barn, threw away potatoes, straw in the barn, hay in the barn. There was wood in the shed, they were throwing all the wood chips around and looking for any remnants of the partisans. But it was Zarevo, they didn't leave anything behind. The whole group of fifty people who turned the cottage inside out and almost climbed into the chimney, they found nothing at all."

"Mom came in the afternoon, we listened to her and found out that she was trying to push us away and talk in such a way that we wouldn't know what she was talking about with grandpa and grandma. The more we wanted to know all and find out the core of the matter. We didn't succeed on the first day. However, when my mother came the next day, my grandfather told us that they were going home to the gamekeeper´s cottage, but that there were gendarmes with us and we had to be quiet and not say anything anywhere. Because otherwise the Germans would have shot my father and mother and probably us too. So, they also got us interested in it. The next day in the evening, grandpa led us to the cottage. We went to see grandpa and my brother and I raced how we would be heroes in front of the gendarmes when we were at home. But when we came around the fence to the gate, the Russian man, who was on guard, opened the gate, got up and we got scared. We lost our minds and we were glad to be alive."

"So, on the 20th or the 19th (of December) they received an order from Kiev, that on the evening of the 22nd, a train with tanks would go from Pilsen via Pardubice to the Russian front. So that they would blow it up, namely on the bridge over the Elbe near Přelouč. Such a detail had Kyiv. And he knew it, he told the commander, so he sent a group of six and they were his original ones, about three, and three were from the prisoners who joined them there. Because the commander's name was Pukin, but I didn't see him, I only found out later, we didn't see them, they were already gone, they were already away. I know that they said that later. My father led them to the village of Sloupno, it's there below Ždírc, along the Doubrava, where the Železné hory are. So, the partisans, because it was easy, the route, so they went along the edge of the Železné hory, they couldn't get lost there, until they came to that Přelouč. They had machine guns and carried fifteen kilos of explosives with them, which they were supposed to place on that bridge. And until that train hits it, so that it bangs. Unfortunately, it didn't happen."

"On December 18, 1944, a group of Russian partisans came to our cottage in the morning. There were seventeen of them. They were between eighteen and forty years old. So, the guys were in their boom, strong, but they walked, they had a twenty-five kilometer march through the snow. No footpath, no road, straight across the field. This was a group of Soviet soldiers who were selected to help the Slovak National Uprising and were dropped off at Tri Duby Airport near Sliač pod Banská Bystrica, there was an airport there. And they still in that October, normally there the plane landed, they didn't jump with parachutes, the plane landed, they got out. And they were supposed to help with the Slovak national uprising, but when they went there for a day, two days, and the commander saw it, his name was Fausto, they called him, and he was a captain of the Russian army. That's how he found out that the uprising was actually over, that the overwhelming force of Germans that surged in from Hungary, from the west of Slovakia, from the north from Poland, was so huge that the insurgents, there were probably several thousand of them, were forced to flee to Malé Fatry and climb into those hills in the Tatras to disappear from the eyes of the Germans. And they couldn't really do anything anymore. He came to this conclusion. And they were equipped, they had a radio, a walkie-talkie, and a radio to receive messages, so they called to Kiev, there was the headquarters of the partisan war, what to do. So, they told them: "Go to Czech." On foot, they couldn't drop off a car for them, but they told them: "You have to go through Kysuce to Poland and at Jablunkov you will cross from Poland to Moravia." Because the border from Jablunkov to the south between Moravia and Slovakia is heavily defended, and you wouldn't be able to pass there."

"I remember that from Slavětín, those four years, the first four years of my life, I remember, for example, when the Germans came. On the fifteenth, they arrived around the sixteenth of March 1939. I was not yet four years old, but I remember that you could see from the window of the gamekeeper´s cottage, there were about two houses across the road, and they were standing there with those trucks, jumping out of those cars. I don't know how many there were, I couldn't find out. But they dispersed among the houses, and because each house was heated, maybe the men were in the forest, as I said, the general part, but the women were at home, waiting for the children to come from school, cooking, or had small children at home. And I remember that they also came to us, there were probably five or six of those Germans. But they behaved quite calmly."