Václav Novák

“We came there and other trucks arrived there and they brought in army material and food and all these supplies. All the trucks were standing there in front of the convent. They started evicting the nuns. With everything they had. They made them board the trucks and they were taking them somewhere away, we did not even know where. Our accommodation thus started from scratch. Straw and straw mattresses were brought there and we thus had to fill our mattresses with straw and then some time later they brought iron beds as well. We thus had to prepare everything by ourselves. There was a field kitchen outside, and they were cooking meals for us and things like that so that we would be able to exist there. I saw when they were evicting the nuns; they did not even allow them to go back to their rooms if some of them forgot something in their rooms, like a picture, or something. They grabbed them and they brutally made them get into the cars and they were taking them away. Some of them were crying, some were shouting, and the abbess, I can see it vividly, she kept defending them all the time and she was resisting, but it was of no use. The operation, the eviction itself, lasted perhaps for three or four hours. And then we began furnishing the place for ourselves, and since I was a graduate of a secondary technical school of civil engineering and I had the second lieutenant’s rank, they appointed me the troop commander and therefore I participated in all this preparation. I could thus see in the chapel, for example, that they turned one of the chapels into a magazine of army food supplies, and from there they were issuing thousands and thousands of army food cans and stuff like that. And ammunition was stored in the other chapel.”