Adolf Řehoř

“German was one of the obligatory classes right from the first year. We were taught by Czech teachers because we were in the Protectorate, not in the Sudetes. My wife was in the Sudetes. In Biskupice, which was the neighbouring village. Everything around this village was all the Sudetes. Zadní Arnoštov, Víska, Biskupice, Chornice, those were all part of the Sudetes, they belonged to Germany. And Jevíčko here, Jaroměřice, Velké Opatovice, that was the Protectorate. Jevíčko also had a German school, it had the Hitlerjugend and the German Kuratorium. I remember how they always told us: ‘When the Hitlerjugend march by you, you have to stand at attention and stay where you are and salute them.’ It was because we were scared, they were nasty, those boys from the Hitlerjugend. They owned the factory, Hotel Eden, and they had the German school. And they were raised to consider themselves something better than the other inhabitants. Those were children who mostly attended the German school, they had brown shirts, they swore at Czechs, yelled at them. I didn’t witness them beat anyone up. We usually just stood at attention. We had to use the salute at school mainly, when there was a celebration, say, of Hitler’s birthday or of the founding of the Protectorate on 15 March. We had to sing the German anthem and also Die Fahne Hoch. They taught us to do that.”

“It happened on 9 May 1945. The night from 8 to 9 May we didn’t sleep a wink, we were dressed. We were waiting if we would have to abandon the house and escape somewhere. We could hear artillery from the square. German soldiers were shooting into residential houses, I was scared. I know I just fidgeted on my bed in my clothes. The other citizens were also prepared for the worst. Lieutenant Colonel Max von Groll of the Germans shot himself in the square, towards morning. What happened was that we then saw a huge stampede of Germans in the direction of Zadní Arnoštov. They wanted to get to the West. At 12:55 the first Soviet car arrived; it passed through our town and stopped at our place. Other cars followed. They rounded up the Germans, disarmed them, and returned them to the town. Then they were escorted to the Sokol gym hall, where they were imprisoned. There was a celebration in the evening. All the soldiers shot rockets. By chance they set fire to the neighbour’s shed. They then extinguished the fire with buckets of water from on top of our roof, the second shed. It was a pretty drastic ending. I remember that during the celebration, they came into one house where they had adult daughters, so they wanted to have it off with them. They had a bucket full of liquor, which they drank from a cup. I know that [the daughters’] father ran in his underwear all the way to the town hall to the commander, to get him to call them off. Those were simply two drunk Russians. One [soldier] stole a bike, and the owner chased him until he caught him and took the bike back. I remember that as well. Everything calmed down by morning. There were just heaps of ammunition, heaps of weapons, cannons, etc. It took days to get rid of all that.”