„It happened one night, someone knocked on the window, mom went outside and she did not tell us who they were. And she – we would see her in the evenings - always milked the cow and poured the milk in bottles and boiled potatoes and baked bread, and this way, she threw a shawl over her and went somewhere in the evening, we did not know it, where she goes, and later, when they shot all of them dead, mom confessed that she carried, to those Jews who lived in our neighbourhood, victuals. They came in the night, asked nicely, mom did not give them anything that night. She said: ‘I won’t give you anything, I will be bringing it to the field here under the hedegerow. There was a field and hedgerows and she would carry the food and put it under the hedgerow. And, then, my brother used to complain, he said, ‘But we could all be…’ And, mom was very nice, she helped the hungry a lot during the war. And at nights, many people from villages, Polish ones, hid in our place because they were destroying everything all over the place. They destroyed everything, they destroyed the Poles, everything here, and they hid in our house and our mom kept hiding them. Dad was afraid but the bandits knew, they said, that the Hofmans are hiding people. But nobody ever harassed our dad.”
"They arrested him, they found him, that he is a felon, that he ran away from Germany."
"Who arrested him?"
"The Russians arrested him, put him to the tyurma [prison] because they ran away and he wrote to me to come and join him, that he got four years [of banishment?], not imprisonment, that he is free for four years. He wrote that I come there, that I can work there, I can milk the cows, and my dad did not care about the idea of me going anywhere and he says, she doesn't milk cows at home because dad was afraid, the time was messy, there were various bands and he said, she is not going anywhere, you serve your term and then you come. And I did not go so he married another woman there."
"And Mrs Tarabová begged her husband: 'Let's leave!' He wasn't really happy about the idea, and the Ukrainians kept saying: 'Don't be afraid, don't be afraid!' And it was a wonderful evening, it was in autumn, and full wagons arrived, during the night, it was before dawn, and they took the cow out, tied it [to a wagon] and Vágner heard it and jumped up, and the bell, he rang the bell, and the Czechs came running to defend themselves because they saw what was going on, that gang. And they started shooting at the Czechs, at people, and people couldn't do anything. Those children as well as them, they tied them up and put on carts and took them away and destroyed them somewhere there. Hard to say, I remember the children a bit because I would go there to visit auntie in Kopč, that's what mom's sister told when they went to Czechoslovakia, so they went in the month of March and this happened in autumn and they were in our place for two weeks and auntie Mařenka Vaníčková told us, she was shaking when she was talking, how they came to destroy them."
Františka Klasonová was born on the 10th June of 1929 in the village of Teremno near the town of Luck in Volhynia as the fourth child in the Hofman family who were Czech. While her older siblings attended Czech language school, she went to Polish basic school. The suburbs of Luck where Františka spent her childhood, was changed by the events of the WWII. First, their German neighbours disappeared, then Jews, Poles and at the end, Czechs. After WWII, the Soviet administration was very harsh and it aimed to destroy small businesses and private ownership. The witness married a Czech, Saša Hybner, who was arrested shortly after their wedding and banished to Siberia. Despite this, she spent all her life in Volhynia. She is one of the last Volhynian Czechs for whom Czech is a mother tongue. In 2019, she lived in Luck in Volhynia.
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