Marie Kovářová

“I was sitting there, and suddenly a Gaz car stopped there, with brakes squealing. A Russian colonel got out and started speaking Russian to me. ´I don’t understand, I don’t understand.´ – ´How come you don’t understand?´ – ´I don’t know what you want.´ There was an old dilapidated mill by the road from Kolinec to the village, and it was now all in ruins. Only the gable remained, and somebody wrote on this gable in Czech and Russian: ´Lenin, get up, Brezhnev has gone mad.´ I said that I didn’t understand. My husband was working with a harvester there at that time while we were there on vacation. He was helping them. Now, they all got out of the pub and he began shouting at them. Uncle Vašťář, who was the chairman of the local agricultural cooperative, was being shouted at, and he kept telling him: ´I don’t understand you.´ Mom told me: ´Go there, please, because none of them speaks Russian.´ I said to her: ´But Mom, I had told him that I couldn’t understand Russian.´ Mom replied: ´But you got your husband there.´ They were able to shoot, and the Russians didn’t use blank cartridges. What was I to do? And so I went. If he could kill me with his stare, he would. I told him: ´Uncle, he wants to know what’s written there and who wrote it.´ He replied: ´Maruška, tell him that we are in the harvest season and we have other things to worry about, we don’t just hang around. If they have a problem with it, let them wipe it away or tear the whole house down.´ I translated it for the colonel. He got into his car and left.”

“Mom received the notice of the death penalty, and she was permitted a visit. Uncle, therefore, went with her to Prague, but unfortunately she didn’t see dad any more. She brought a few things for him, and she said to the warden: ´Sir, take this.´ – ´The only thing I can tell you is that he had been taken away last night, but unfortunately I don’t know where.´ The man was a Gestapo member, too. That was in the prison in Prague-Pankrác.”

“They would go and slap you. They were huge men, and you just dropped to the ground. I would fall on the armchair, or on the couch, they didn’t care where you fell. But the slapping didn’t matter so much. What was worse was the quirt they would use. You can’t imagine that… beating children with it. But I have to admit one thing – they did force us, children, to confess some things during the beating. But it was our parents who were doing the resistance activities without us knowing about it.”