Květa Pěničková

“My father went grey during the war. And I learnt how to pray very intensely. Because one time Dad went by himself to Petschek’s Palace. It happened thus: In our house there lived a certain Mr Mašek, who tried all sorts of tricks and slander against my father to obtain our flat. Dad would go to work with one Mr Bláha, also from Velká Chuchle, who endorsed the Nazis during the war and was then a clerk at the Petschekery. When they were standing on Wenceslas Square one time, watching Hitler’s arrival, my father declared: ‘If I had a machine gun, I would take the beast down right here, no matter what happened.’ But Mr Bláha asked him never to say anything like that in front of him again. He didn’t take it any further, luckily. So Dad went to visit him one time at the Petchekery. And he, like every Nazi, was grooming ‘his Jew’, his back door in case Germany lost. And so instead of complying with the arrest that Mašek was suggesting, he sent my father home and sent [Mr Mašek] away from Prague for a year for excessive blackmailing of half-Jewish families.”

“After the war the German army was taken from Prague and put into the Zbraslav Camp. People with bandaged heads, some even crawling on all fours. In Chuchle we had one ‘good citizen’ who collaborated with the Germans during the war. He lived in a secluded cottage in the forest, and one time a transport passed him by headed to the concentration camp. Two of the poor blighters were somehow able to escape, and they climbed up into his loft. Not only did he not help them, but he even told on them. And then he wanted to show his zeal and to clean himself. So he found himself a large piece of wood, and he went to the road and started bashing the soldiers on their battered heads. My father called on a few friends and they went to protect the soldiers.”

“This is how my partner, Hans Baier, remembered the Revolutionary Guard. Back then they had arrived in Bučina, where they terrorised the local inhabitants. They gathered up all the men older than fourteen years of age to Hotel Fastner, which used to stand there. The interrogations began and Hans and his father were first up, according to the alphabet. First they took the father. They rest waited in a room nearby. They didn’t know what was going on. His father didn’t return. Then they took the son. He went through a kind of corridor, and received a couple of slaps from each of the Guardists. He then came to a table where a man sat who spoke fluent Czech. The man showed him a paperweight with a swastika on it. The man asked him what it was. He answered, of course, that it was a hakenkreuz. Wham, they gave him one. Then he showed him Hitler and the same was repeated. Finally, he said: ‘You attended grammar school in Prachatice. That was a Nazi school, they brought you up in Nazism.’ They they knocked him down and beat him so badly that they smashed in a kidney. They beat them black and blue and then threw them into the cellar. Down the stairs like a piece of rag. He kept wondering where his dad was. Semi-conscious as he was he heard some groans. And then he fell right on top of his dad. The second day they dragged them out of the cellar. They couldn’t see for the bruises they had, they could hardly crawl. They gave them a saw and made them saw wood the whole day while constantly repeating: Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler…”

“Franz Pösl lived alone in the forest, in a seclusion not far from Zlatá Studna. He had a lot going for him and he realised he was in danger. That if they caught someone and beat them up, he would be betrayed. And that happened and they came to get him. Because they knew he was an old smuggler, in good physical condition and brave, and that he would be able to escape them, they came up with a trap. They came to him saying they had been bogged down in the forest, if he wouldn’t lend them a plank. He brought them one and they said: ‘We’re arresting you.’ ”