Josef Novotný

"We said at a public meeting of the Czechoslovak Yout Union (ČSM) at the time that we shouldn't pay the contribution - it was 1 crown, or 50 pennies a month - because the ČSM doesn't give us anything, they don't do anything for us, so why should we put money into them when we don't have it anyway. So in a short time my father was invited to come to Brno. And the director - I still remember, his name was Hronek - told him that if there was anything like that again, I would be expelled from the library school. So my father, almost in tears, scolded me, saying that after all, I wanted to be that librarian and where else would I like to go and so on."

"That's how the partisans appeared, it had been said for some time that there were some partisans in the deep forests in and around Javořice. And we know that there were two kinds of partisans at that time, weren´t they. There were partisans who were really suffering there, they made some of those bunkers underground, they were hidden there, and at night they were arranged with some gamekeeper or somebody so that they wouldn't die of hunger. So they were partisans. And then there were the hurray partisans who appeared after the liberation. Suddenly they knew that he had a rifle or a pistol or that hunting two somewhere behind a beam, and they joined the few here."