Agnesa Krajíčková

"Our director went to Prague where they assured him that there would be no dam. Major repairs began at the factory. And my family bought another house that was for sale. It was better equipped, had five rooms, a water toilet and a bathroom. I took a loan from my employer's social fund. We sold our former house for 100,000 crowns and the new house cost 130,000 crowns, so I loaned 30,000 crowns and we moved. We added a garage because it wasn't there. We didn't have much money then, so to buy coal, for example, we kept sheep. Then we also started to raise coypus. We built a coypu shack, a barn and a hayloft. We also bought a bull to resell at a profit. We had to get a permit to raise coypus from the District National Committee because we lived in the protection zone of the Kružberk reservoir. We had to make a special sump for the coypus because they need water. We modified our electrical installations from two-phase to three-phase and got a new facade on the house, in short we invested a lot in the house. Suddenly the announcement came that the dam was would be built. I had just finished paying off the loan, and we had to move out."

"My cousin Pavel Jaroš graduated from the Žižka Military School and lived in Brno-Ivanovice. He met his future wife Libuše in hospital in Olomouc. They got married and had daughter Libuše. They moved to Brno, but I don't know what his occupation was. During the invasion in 1968, he and two other men knocked over a statue of Stalin at night. That very night, someone tipped him off to escape, claiming the police would come for him. He was hiding with his grandmother in Ivanovice. He must have been denounced by one of his friends who knew about it; someone who wanted to please the authorities. All three of them fled by car to Austria because it's the closest from Brno. They didn't even need a passport at the border then, because there was a lot of confusion on 21 August. He stayed in a refugee internment camp for about two months and then went to Australia."

"My father served in the military as a radio operator. My uncle had been in the Royal Air Force, and the Communists treated those soldiers badly after the war. They came back with glory but many of them ended up in prison afterwards. One day, two men came and took my father to Olomouc. They interrogated him for three days. He didn't know why. He said he was alone in a room, a man came to him, shone a light in his face and shouted at him: 'Confess!' My father didn't know what to confess to. The reason why he was arrested was that someone in Leskovec nad Moravicí made illegal radio transmissions; I don't know where to. He was arrested exactly because he was a radio operator. He hadn't slept in two days. On the third day, another man came and asked why he was being held there. My father told him that the military had given him Morse code to copy a thousand times yet he never learned it. He also said he had only gone to school for three years, and only in the winter when he wasn't herding cows. He herded cows for the local people to earn a living. By not going to school enough, he wrote poorly, like merging two words together. Finally, he asked: 'How could I do such a thing?' They apologised and let him go home."

"So Mr. Heppler lived with Mrs. Fleischer?" - "Yes, with Fleischer." - "And she was German and he was Jewish?" - "She was German and he was Jewish. He was from Brno and during the war he was a foreman in an aircraft engine factory. There was sabotage there. The Germans found out that the workers would deliberately assemble the engines wrong. He didn't know that the workers were sabotaging. I don't know anything about the fate of the workers, maybe the Germans executed them. Mr. Heppler was arrested and placed in Kounic's dormitory. Every time he told us about his experiences there, he cried. For example, they left him hanging upside down. His head was like a bucket, then they threw him down and poured water on him. After a while, they moved him to the concentration camp in Dachau where he met the later President Antonín Zápotocký who was a note-taker there. He was better off in Dachau than the other prisoners." - "Who was better off?" - "Antonín Zápotocký, the president." - "And did Mr. Heppler tell you about his Dachau experiences?" - "Yes, he did. For example, a woman gave birth there and an SS man took the newborn child by the legs and smashed the baby's head against the corner of the barracks. The lady had to watch. But I don't think Dachau was the worst concentration camp. Mr. Heppler was there for four years. He was in charge of the rabbits they kept in the prison. He'd give them dry bread, and when no one was looking, he'd put one of the scraps in his blouse. Someone saw him do it and he had to strip naked and walk around the 'appellplatz' twenty-five times on his elbows and knees. That was his punishment. But he survived."

"My mother told me that there used to be a postman in Olešná. He was a very good and fair man. Delivering the mail in the hills around Olešná could take him all day. The Germans took advantage of this and forced him to join the Hlinka Guard. It was the same later when they forced people to join the State Security. Those people got there involuntarily, and so he was a member of the Hlinka Guard. The Germans wanted him to inform them about the guerrillas. He was a fair man and never turned anyone in. Later on, our neighbour Matuš told my mother what happened to the postman. The guerrillas caught him, stripped him down to his underwear, gave him all their weapons and made him sit barefoot in the snow. The neighbour was there with a sledge to take him away should the guerrillas hurt him. The guerrillas then beat the postman to death with the butts of their guns. The neighbour saw it go down. Then he loaded his body and took it away. Such things happened."