Eduard Steun

"Those Germans with no post or property could stay there if they wanted. But gamekeepers, foresters, farmers with property, teachers, they all had to leave. But those forest workers could stay. So the people from Zlatá Studna left voluntarily. But they could not take very much of their property with them. They had to leave a lot of things behind. But in 1950 everyone still remaining in Zlatá Studna left. As soon as they left, the buildings had to be demolished, in order to make sure that the saboteurs could not hide in them. And that's how the village of Zlatá Studna was destroyed. Only the pub under the gamekeeper's lodge survived and only for a short while. The Czech National Museum built there what they called a biological station. Usually during the summer, various botanists, zoologists etc. came to explore plants and animals. They went to Mezilesní slať. Especially doctor Hanzák, a renowned zoologist, or the botanist Ivan Klášterský."

"My brother - when he was temporarily working in the Kvilda forest district - was entrusted with the Černá hora forest section. For some time, there was no coach driver for wood delivery. So my brother took care of it and one day, two German women from Kvilda got lost. No-one knew what happened to them, they simply disappeared. Later there came a postcard from Germany with a big diagonal CENSORED stamp on it. In that message the German women thanked my brother for helping them to cross the border. My father went almost crazy; I thought that he was going to kill him. Because if the border guards or the police had found out about it, they would have imprisoned my parents and put us in a home for children and that would be terrible. He loaded them on his cart, threw hay on them and headed for the border, like if he was carrying horse fodder. Later he told us that he had even encountered the border guards. But since they knew him, they exchanged a few words and let him go. They had no idea that he had two grannies underneath the hay."

"Me and my sister had to sit on a sofa in the kitchen while the State Security members were searching the whole house. My mother had to assist them, because my father was not at home. And we had to sit on that couch while a soldier with a machine gun was watching us. He was standing right in front of us and I got a good view, so I can remember to this day what he wore, how he looked like, everything. I know that he had these leather straps on his trousers and black working boots. It was before they started wearing those big black army boots. I know that precisely because I was looking at his feet while he was walking there holding his machine gun in his hands. Not that he was pointing it at us, but he had to watch us. The backyard was full of soldiers, policemen and those agents. They were definitely from the State Security. They had these leather coats and wore hats on their heads, they looked exactly the same, like if they had a uniform. They had visited us several times before and they always wanted to know something. They wanted to know if there was someone asking for a way to the border and things like that. That was happening all the time. And when they burned down the house of the Pösl family, they wanted to know, who slept where and so on. There was a barn right next to our lodge and it was always open for a pair of tamed does, who came there for hay. So it could have easily happened that someone had stayed there overnight. Therefore my parents were terrified of any traces to be found there. Fortunately nothing like that was found there. But the State Security agents visited us several more times after that."

"After my father arrived to Literbach, he wanted to familiarize himself with the terrain so he would have an idea of what forests he had to manage. So they were walking through the woods together with the trainee Kroupa. And one day, in a place on the edge of the forest called Zaječí tanec or Rabbit dance, they found shoe tips sticking out of the ground in several places. So they dug a little into the earth and found corpses. My father reported the find immediately to the SNB (National Security Corps – the regular police) and soon experts from Pilsen arrived. They found out that it was corpses of twelve women from the death march from the Svatava concentration camp, which was next to Skolov. It was called Falknov back then. It was twelve women. And they had to be exhumed. So they brought the Germans from Literbach and they had to exhume them with no equipment, even without gloves. They said that it was a horrible stench. It was sort of a punishment for them."