Kristina Tesková

"I also had one experience with the Russians. I was walking down the street and I saw a Russian in uniform and with a rifle carrying my doll stroller. It was new and nice, and I came running to my mother, crying and saying that the Russian was leading my pram. My mom, who had already had to do without the furniture and the apartment and everything, got mad that I was crying and ran out to the Russian. They had another staff at the farmhouse and that's probably where they were gathering the things they were going to take to Russia. So, mom ran after her, caught up with her and said: 'That's my pram!' And the Russian woman shouted: 'Eto moj.' They argued over the pram until her mother snatched it out of her hand. The Russian didn't use a gun, she didn't do anything. She let her mom walk away with the stroller. I was glad. But I only had a pram, I hadn't had a doll for about two or three years. I had six dolls in the house before that. They all stayed there."

"We arrived in Hlučín in the morning, and there was a guard at the door, a Russian soldier with a machine gun. Of course, he was pointing out that we couldn't go in. So, we stayed in front of the house. My mother, who was somehow more courageous, after a while she went to the town office or the town hall and told the official there: 'Please, we came from flichtování [escaping from the front] and we can't get home. We are two women and we have eight small children. He just nodded his head. And my mother said: 'Are we supposed to go drown ourselves?' He said he couldn't stop her in doing so. So, she went back and sat on the suitcases. We were flying around, but night was coming on. And then Tante [Aunt] Vefa, as we called her, came. She was the maid of a lady who was once a maid to the Countess in Šilheřovice. She was such an intelligent lady, very kind. When she heard that we were sitting in front of the house, she sent her to take us to their house. They had a small villa in which we were given a little room to stay."

"Then a train came, so we got on. Mom and Auntie gave each kid half a sleeping pill. We fell asleep on the benches. I was the second or third oldest of us kids. When I woke up, I called out in German: 'Mutti, ich will pullen. Mom, I have to pee.' When the people around heard that, a commotion broke out: 'What? Do we have a German here? Let's get rid of her!' Before that they were speaking about how we should take revenge on the Germans. They said it would be best to skin them and salt them, that sort of thing. And suddenly - the German girl here speaks German. The men took me, a six-year-old kid, and stuffed me out the window. Our mother started screaming. She grabbed my legs and saved me. But she was helped by a Jew coming back from the concentration camp. He shouted at the rampaging people: 'Aren't you ashamed to take revenge on a child?'"

"What I remember most is how we were - as people used to say in our region – ‘flichtovat’, meaning running away from the front. It's from the word flüchtling [refugee – trans.]. There was no radio at that time, so the barker or announcer, Mr. Pytlík, would go around with a bell and read the announcement from the town hall. And one day he announced that all people from Hlučín had to flee from the front because the Russians were coming, they were going to fight here and they were going to kill women and children, so everybody had to evacuate. It was all women and children. We children flew there immediately. And the women asked Mr. Pytlík, 'Mr. Pytlík, where should we go?' And he said to them aside: 'Well, to hell.' So, most people didn't go anywhere. The women who were left alone without men, but they were scared, even my aunt and my mother. My aunt had a brother who was a parish priest in Štíty, that's somewhere near here in Moravia, so my aunt decided that we would go to him, that we would have protection there. They took a lorry and a French prisoner as a driver, and loaded up blankets, quilts and us eight children. We took it as a trip and we wanted to take some toys with us. I guess because we were fighting, the mothers decided that nobody would take any toys, which was a big mistake because we didn't have any toys at all for two or three years after that."