Jaroslav Macoun

"In '44 they escaped - there was actually a kind of camp in the station in Mezimesti at that time for the citizens of - how do I have to say it today - the Soviet Union, and they sort of worked there, and among them was - I'll say this right now - my future mother-in-law Lydia Goshko, a Ukrainian, and she and two others escaped from there and got to the Marshov Valley. If you know it a little bit, it's called the Black Hut, so some of the Petrovichi people there, only I remember that Eduard Benes was involved, and others certainly were too. They actually built there in such a rock, so they covered it, such a crevice and there they were. And Lydia Goshko, she got sick with pneumonia. And my mother took the risk of taking her home. If some, I don't know what I would call it, traitor or just a snitch had come along and snitched on us, we were already in a bad way, it would probably have turned out badly. She lasted with us, the other ones, they were still living there, then maybe they went somewhere else, they were men too, I mean. And she survived with us until May 1945."

"There in the courtyard she showed us where the guillotine was. I wanted to know where the visiting rooms were, but that didn't survive, it was a building for a completely different purpose and that just didn't appear in the sources. Next we got to the cemetery where there's this huge stone slab, perhaps sandstone. But it's not, it's not that it's a meter by twenty, it's, I'm guessing, maybe three by four, maybe I'm wrong, but a big one, maybe bigger than I am, where there were names of the Czechs who were executed. I was a little bit ahead before, they took us to this archive where they preserved some basic information about my father, not only about him, with a photo. And then at the cemetery there was another shock for me. He's not on the plaque! His name isn't there, and so we were accompanied, along with Mrs Veselovka, also by a historian of German nationality, and they were perfectly conversant in German, and so I asked why he wasn't there. Which then caused such a stir with the lady from Germany, how can I put this, what can I say, because then I finally learned that some of those executed - their bodies were taken to Leipzig to the physiological institute where actually perhaps future medics or I don't know who else would be interested in this - were made available for autopsy and other study things."

"Heydrich came and many people were affected. My father was first in pre-trial detention in Tábor, then he went to Terezín for a little while and to Budyšín, then Bautzen, and ended up in Dresden, where as a very young boy, perhaps four years old, I went to visit him once with my mother. It's a kind of a memory for me... I don't know... not a terrible one... just a kind of... when they brought him to these bars and we sat with my mother at the bars and had a chance to talk to him for a while. He was then tried and in April, probably April 15, 1943, when I was five years old, he was executed in Dresden."