Helena Šeflová

"The government called for replenishment when the Germans were displaced abroad because there were whole empty villages full of trades. It was said that all the small tradesmen would be able to continue to thrive there. Craftsmen and such. So Dad and Mum went there with that. My dad wanted to have his own bakery. He found this big house in 1948, and they moved in at Christmas 1948, and I was born a year later in November 1949, and I don't remember him baking. Although my mother told me that they hold me and I used to take a supply of flour in sacks, but I don't remember that. It could have been 1951, a committee came from Liberec. Dad knew one of the members, and years later we lived next door to him in Nové Město pod Smrkem. And without any notice that they were coming or that according to some paragraph they didn't have to bake anymore - Dad had things being baked there, he was taking things out of the oven, he had buckets with dough in them. Saying, 'Just to be clear, you're done here.' They threw everything around, stomped on it, poured out the buckets, and he was finished."

"In Liberec, when we found out. After a while, someone smuggled in a bunch of photos, we weren't allowed to say anything. People were climbing on the roofs at the town hall and taking pictures. The soldiers, when they found out that somebody was taking pictures, they shot at people too. People were crawling on the roofs to see what happened there, that nobody made it up. That's when we saw the photos... Maybe it was the beginning of 1969, so someone brought them to us and told us, 'You can look at these, but you can't say that anywhere,' and took them away again."