Marianna Staňková

"The lady we would visit told us that sometime in the autumn of 1945, during the war, she was picking apples on a tree and a Russian soldier walked by, maybe a commander or so. He probably knew some German and spoke to her. She didn't speak Russian. He spoke to her, he asked her, and then he said, 'You're not going to pick them next year,' and she wondered why. He didn't tell her the whole truth, he just told her that she wouldn't be picking any more apples from that tree next year. He didn't tell her directly that they would be deported, only that he wouldn't be around anymore. I guess he wanted to let her know that something was going to happen."

"When the Germans who had been deported were allowed to visit back, they learned or knew already who lived there. They had hidden a lot of things in the fields and in the stone heaps collected from the fields; those were enclosed and they'd put things like china in there. They also kept believing they would come back one day, so they had it stashed in different ways. By then, the Czechs knew that the Germans were looking for it, and you could hear them going through stones and throwing them around, looking for it."