Anna Sedláková

"As I had said, my dad followed the radio transmission from London and from that cracking of the radio we always learned only tjat it will be over soon, that the liberationis near. And then, really, the Red Army got a great welcome, really nice, people welcomed them everywhere, the lilacs were in full bloom, it was so relaxed, happy, but the price was high. Most people died at the end of the war. And it was... one night, someone banged the door, in Vysočina, the houses had this sort of covered entrance to the yard, and such sheds, so that we let the Red Army inside to the yard, so that the soldiers can get a wash, and that we give them some food. And there were two cars in our yard, mom brought them water for washing. And that food. They didn't know our food, but they were grateful for the wash and such because after that journey, they were all tired and covered in dust as they travelled from afar. And my dad was really happy to see them, he said that now everything would be all right, everything would be fine from now on. But it... after... the people... the army was as it was, people from all ends, they came and didn't know many of the things. They didn't know clocks, they only had wristwatches and kept saying Gimme watch, or they even took those that the older men wore in their vests. It was something entirely new for them. And in one house, they had a cuckoo clock and when it sounded, they started shooting at the cuckoo because they didn't know such a thing."

"I left school when I was fourteen and at that age, I had ambitions, I nwanted to learn something, see something, do something. But, alas. We couldn't do anything like that, we worked in the United Agricultural Cooperative and it was such a time, bad time, [time of] dossiers. Dossiers were written all the time, they were kept n everyone. We were leaving school and we needed credentials for the dossier - what's our family background, where are we aiming at, whether we're going towards capitalism or whether our direction is socialist.... so it was damn difficult but I still wanted somewhere. And then there was that possibility, at the age of sixteen - they opened a school in Hlinsko - when we could go to school from October until April and in summer, we had to work in the co-op andthat was for two years. And there one at least got to know something, experienced something, we even learned something there, it was a school with great teachers and they tried to convey some knowledge so that we would be good farmers [with good class awareness]. But the unit was eight crowns [note: the work done for the co-op was calculated in units depending on the crop or work done, the units had different monetary value] and when one earned fifteeen crowns per day, young people were unhappy, I saw that those who commute to work in the factories earn much more."

"All those things that were going on, that armed resistance, they talked about it only after the war ended, because only as children we saw all those things happening around us at Vysočina. There was resistance operating but one can say that it was viciously supressed. Then later, as schoolchildren, we were near Leskovice where the Red Army soldiers landed and because they fell with parachutes, someone saw them and they all got shot there. Really, they have a memorial there, we were there as children, then when it was getting unveiled, we went there as a school group. So, all these things were going on there."

"The only good thing war brought us, a thing that the whole world got to know, was the Škoda lásky [Roll out the Barrels] polka. Škoda lásky was played for the pilots in England, before they took off for fight, music played for them because nobody knew whether they were going to return. And this song became so popular that they played it in all languages, the French, the Americans, the Englishmen. And nobody knew who composed it, that it was our Mr. Vejvoda. So, this was a sort of a small victory of ours."