Milada Mayerová

"There was a swing door next to the sink, my husband was inside and my sister as well. The door was swinging a little bit. I dropped the bucket! I rushed back in and said: ‚There's someone there! The door's swinging!’ And my husband told me that he should have told me that there were three German women staying at the bar room. There were a dreaded SS woman and her two daughters with a baby. They were caught in Lovosice and the national committee in Lovosice was supposed to send them somewhere before anything would happen. So they put them in the former bar room. That was September 28th, and from October 1st Mayer [husband] was to join the army in Teplice for six months. Now me, my sister and the baby - I already had a daughter, we were to stay there, in this pillaged apartment, with only what we brought and together with three German women, the dreaded ones, [staying] across the hall. The old one, I never saw her, I never saw her with my eyes. The older daughter, who had the little boy, I saw her twice. But with the youngest one, she was eighteen at the time, we became friends. We got on quite well. Now I'm going to skip 18 years. Someone is ringing the doorbell, I´m going to open the door, there were three steps and two more steps, I'm standing on the second step. There's a tall lady standing down there. When she saw me she threw herself on me, she started hugging me and she was delighted to see me. She reached out like that, pulled out a boy, a six-foot tall guy. That was Eva, the youngest one, [whom I knew as] 18 years old. She said, ‚Sasha!’ He was three months old when they stayed with us. And she was chattering something to Sasha and something to me, so I invited them in. It was nice of them to come by like that after eighteen years."

"They were people from Romania, from Bessarabia, and when the 1945 was approaching, they were running away from the Russians. Huge queues, what they could, they loaded onto a wagon. Huge queues were stretching and the main road Austria - Jindřichův Hradec - Kardašova Řečice - Veselí nad Lužnicí runs through our village, from east to west through our village. And when their horse fell, because it couldn´t go on anymore, they left it where it fell and came to our village. We were ordered to comply with all their wishes, of national guests. And so it happened that there were only two horses left in our village. My husband and I were there, it was just before spring. They still announced news by drumming, the drummer was there, right. And [they announced] that the national guests were coming, whoever had some food to bring it immediately to the pub by the road. And the last two horses that were there was our gelding and another one. So my Dad was told to bring those two horses in. Dad said: ‚For Christ's sake, if I hand over the horses now, what are we going to do? How are we going to till, how are we going to sow?‘ People had already known that if they gave something voluntarily, a few eggs, bread and stuff, that their houses wouldn't be searched and looted. So my dad took the horse away and we were standing on the doorstep, all very sad. And Dad said: ‚Horses are available here, in the neighbouring villages, but I don't have six thousand.‘ And Mayer, I still see him standing there, he took out his wallet, took out six thousand, gave it to Dad and said: ‚Here's money for a horse and you don't have to pay me back.‘ He still had money at that time! The crowds of those national guests came pouring in and our village was without horses."