Marie Nováková

"When the German population was evicted, there were villages everywhere in the border area, not yet Lipno, where it was necessary to harvest after the removal. Workers from big cities, for example from Prague and so on, used to come there to work. In 1946, we already got those temporary jobs there. They sowed mostly flax. And then we used to go on trucks in the morning, we had to dress properly, some gloves. We were picking flax. Or we were picking potatoes. The flax, that was worse, because the fields were overgrown with thistles, it wasn't plowed, it was plowed a little bit, it was sown, and it stung terribly, and it hurt your hands. So we had... my parents got me leather gloves. We usually ate one hot meal. It was in some farmhouse, some lady had a big pot of soup. I remember one time we got soup with hail or flakes in it, and now we were looking at it and they had worms swimming in there besides the hail. Well, because God knows where those hailstones were, they were left in some pantry somewhere after those Germans. So I know we were very hungry. We had two pieces of bread stuck together from home, because we couldn't buy something for a big snack. After the war, there was still food... even cloth, the leaves were called scarves. So we lived quite very poorly."