Zdena Matějová

“When the uprising started in Prague, we all knew that this was the end of the war. But it was the Germans who did the worst things… They burnt down the school in Sedlc and they executed many people…. We ran away to other villages, we were afraid of them. Those who stayed there were shot. There were many dead there... There was Mr. Včelák, and he had the misfortune that he wore a leather jacket, and they pulled him out of his house and ordered him to repair their car. He repaired the car for them and then they shot him to death. I also know of one young man who tried to fight a tank on the bridge close to Prčice with a regular rifle… he had no chance.”

“…I remember that we were feeding a goose and we kept it in the basement so that we would have something to eat... There was no radio, we used a so-called crystal radio instead. It was set up in a way that we were not allowed to listen to foreign broadcasting. It was blocked, and there were house inspections which were checking this. People were mainly listening to the broadcasting from London, because that’s where the exile government was. There was the republic’s president Dr. Beneš, and the foreign minister Jan Masaryk, and he spoke on certain days of the week.”