Mgr. Eva Novotná

"There was, for example, a special department, from the year seventy-seven, a special department where books were dispatched, 'special funds' it was called, which were not allowed to get into the hands of ordinary readers. At regular intervals, an unsigned list of what must not come into the hands of readers came from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of the Interior. All that had to go into those special funds. And these were, for example, books that were completely harmless, only the translation of the book was done by someone whose name was not allowed to appear in public. Of course, there were a lot of scientific journals, and newspapers, and a lot of that went into the special funds. But again, the people who were around the special funds, it was two ladies who knew, that they were doing terribly dangerous work, and the head of that sector, these people were giving permissions to go into those special funds to a number of people, who they had verified, that they weren't going to speak to others about it."

"Then in the 1941 autumn, I know we were burning brushwood in the garden, and in the evening Mrs. Lederer suddenly appeared at our house and gave my mother a box. Smaller than this, about half the size, she said they were going away and she wanted my mother to keep it with her. In it were...when we looked in the box, there were all kinds of gold things, probably family valuables, and Mommy spent the whole war moving them around, hiding them. Every time something happened in the family, or something happened nearby, or somebody got arrested, she and my grandmother would look for a hiding place for this box. It lasted with us until 1945. In the forty-fifth year, during the liberation, after the 9th of May, when the Russian army appeared in Kyšperk, which came from Moravia, from this direction, and because there were quite big yards near the houses, they moved in our yard about five carts with horses. There was a little room upstairs in the house, and in the evening Daddy locked us up in the little room, Grandma, Mummy, and us two girls, and he put a cupboard in front of the door, and he stayed downstairs with the soldiers. And when he let us out in the morning, we found that what we had in the cellar, I'll explain why it was there later, was gone. The alarm clock, my grandmother's watch, the blankets, the Lederer’s box, and the jar of eggs. All that was gone, and various valuables, the clock from the apartment, that was gone too. Well, from that moment on, we became kind of bitter towards our liberators."

"You have to serve this year in the borderlands, they said. My first assignment was to Nekoř, I was there for a year. That was a village where... there was a sign hanging by the Nekoř marker saying, 'We are ashamed of our parents who don't want to join the cooperative.' I rode my bike there, and I rode back home around that sign, to work at the sawmill, to see my dad. And my dad poured me some molasses out of a thermos and said, 'Dear girl, you have to accept the assignment, or you'll be considered to be a freeloader and you'll get arrested.' So I went back and I went to the local school again to introduce myself. I was there for a year, and after a year I got an assignment to Orlické Záhoří, it was then still called Kunštát, it was a village that was completely displaced, originally entirely German, completely displaced, populated by, I'll say it, as we used to say it then, gypsies from Romania. The only Czech there was Jiří Mandl, the head of the sawmill. And otherwise, that was all... maybe there was a German person there. And there were these children in the school. And the head of the school was a slightly older classmate of mine from Kostelec nad Orlicí, Ladislav Rázl, and he said that I was assigned there because he was leaving for some school at our embassy in Egypt or something. He succeeded to get the job and now he was going there. And he said, 'Hey, but you can't be here, there can't be a woman here.' And he pulled out this drawer and he said, 'Look here. I'm sleeping at the school, and I have to have this by my bed at night,' and there was a revolver."