Josef Tichý

"My mother worked in crop production in Soběsuky. At that time, the rate was two crowns forty an hour, and there was an agronomist Cipra, and he gave them some bad work, and my mother said to Cipra, 'Hey, you should give us a raise, it's all dust here.' And he said to her, 'Be glad you have a job! If we didn't have a job for you here, we'd move you to Siberia!'"

"My father's name was František Tichý, he was locked up in Bernau am Chiemsee in the Alps, it was a big prison. There were peat bogs, and they dug them up, took the stumps out and tried to make it into arable land. That's how he survived there somehow. And on April 31, the Americans were coming from Italy, so they put together a group of about ten prisoners, gave them a sack with their civilian clothes, they dressed up and went home. They did that to my father on April 30, but by then, the Americans were already in Bavaria, so first, they walked through the woods and in the fields because they were afraid to go on the road. After all, the SS men were guarding there and shooting these people. They somehow found out, and they got Alpetinek and there was a German, and he said, 'Come to my place, I'll leave you here until morning. You can rest.' So they went there, and in the morning, the Americans took over. One of them spoke English, and he talked to them, and they said, 'Do you know who you slept at? Look, it's an SS man.'"