Soňa Nováková

“Our family lost everything during World War I and then during World War II again. The soldiers took all the cattle and horses and ate them. Mum told me she had just given birth to a little boy, Vládíček [Vladimír]. A unit of Bolshevik soldiers arrived, hammered hooks into our house and tied up their horses… it was so loud. My parents had just harvested clover seeds; those weren’t threshed until the frost. The soldiers ate everything. Once it happened on St Peter and Paul’s day, and they released their horses into the fields, so the horses ate everything. The soldiers ate cows, chickens, horses… nothing was left. They [the family] had to sell a hop field and a part of another field to buy seeds to plant the next year, to have something to eat. They also had to buy horses and cows since the soldiers had taken them all. Mum told me they were just gangs of scruffy, witless people. They would even wear ladies’ shoes and blouses. One of them sat next to mum; she was sick and had a little baby, and he told her: ‘We have a little farmstead at home, but I had to join the gang, otherwise they’d shoot me.’”

“Life during wartime was very difficult. Imagine: there were the Banderites, partisans, and Jews in the forest, and it was the holocaust time. Everybody needed food, warm clothes and horses. We didn’t have much, and when they came and only took that, we said, thank God we’re alive and well. For example, two partisans came riding into a gaggle of geese. They shot one or two, each grabbed one by the neck and off they rode. Or a Jew came in the middle of the night; that was during the war and dad was still at home – he only enlisted later with General Svoboda’s army. A man came in, a gun in his hand, and asked for some bread and something to go with it. We had only bread dough rising in the trough and mum wanted to bake it in the morning. She told him that the Šulc family had just baked bread that day. The families used to help each other out with bread – whoever made it shared some with others. He said he’d walk to the Šulc’s place with mum; it wasn’t too far. He wanted her to ask for the bread since they might not give it to him. So, mum told the stranger with a gun she’d better go alone: if she meets any Banderites, she’ll tell them her teeth are hurting and she’s going to get some pills. She went to the Šulcs, woke them up, and came back with bread. I was alone in the room with the stranger. It was 1944, so I was probably eight. Dad went to the pantry to get some lard and a sausage we had made for the winter to go with the bread. The man had a torch, I guess, and he knelt down and looked under our two beds to check if there was anyone hiding. We didn’t speak to him much. Then my parents brought the food: dad brought lard and a sausage and mum brought bread. The man said he needed a bag that would keep his hands free. You couldn’t buy rucksacks back then, so mum had made a rucksack from a corn bag for sister Marie; she was meant to go to Germany on deployment. She actually left home one day, but the partisans stopped the wagon with people from Moštěnice on the way and didn’t allow them go on. They even gave them a piece of paper to confirm that they had robbed them, and the train left in the meantime so my sister stayed at home. Mum said, I’ll give you my homemade rucksack… After that, my sister Marie would dig peat with other young people from Moštěnice; they called it ‘torp’. They would leave in the morning and come back in the evening; we were happy to have them back home and feed them. Then the stranger asked dad to walk him to the forest. Mum asked him not to: it was flatlands, bare soil and frozen, no crops to hide in. She said he could run and hide in the forest, but if the Banderites caught dad on his way home, he’d have to explain what he was doing there, and what could he say, really? He could see the forest, so there was no use for dad to accompany him. The man agreed and left dad behind.”