Ludmila Uhlířová

“It was November and it was raining. A Jewish man from the town, Srul, had a Ukrainian lover in our village. She was always clean, cream on her skin, a brushed-up hairdo on her head. He dug out a sort of a zemlyanka in this valley in the Popov fields and he put a heater in there and used some grass for heating it. There were no woods or shrubs where we lived. Once in November, when it was raining heavily, a hairy man showed up behind our glass kitchen door. Mother always had the most courage and so she went outside and asked who was there. He said that he was Srul and that he would like a piece of bread. So mother gave him two loaves of bread and some eggs and asked him whether he was able to cook himself some potatoes. He said no, he didn’t have a pot, he had nothing. So whatever mum had she gave him, a piece of butter, a piece of curd cheese. We had no lard because the Germans took our pig and the Bandera group took our heifer.”

“Seventeen Bandera group members once came to us and my brother then got epilepsy. That was in March and about three quarters of a meter of snow had just fallen. They came and told my brother to get dressed and to show them the way. Mother knew that once they took someone that person usually wouldn’t come back and she told them that she would go with them instead. They took him and led him behind our forest. At our field he had to completely undress, lie down into the snow and there they tortured him for three hours. They shot next to his head, and one of them was a Hejduk. The Hejduk family were terrible people, excluded from the Czech society. When he came home he said he was awfully cold. Mother made him linden tea. Before morning came he had his first epileptic seizure. He suffered so much that on 21st August 1976 he went and jumped under a train.”