Ladislav Vilímek

"The Germans blew up a Soviet tank near the cemetery in Jihlava from ambush. My father and I went there to see it, and I still remember the smell, like a fire. I looked inside through the peephole and saw charred body, or rather the remains of a man. My dad pulled me back. The tank stood there for a long time, empty of course, before they took it away. The Communists put a memorial in its place with thanks for the liberation. My father said at the time: 'Yeah, but they didn't liberate us because of the Communists, we Czechs were here.' There was a five-point star of red marble on the memorial. Shortly after 1968, first the star was lost, then someone uprooted the whole monument. I wrote about it in my book. I thought the memorial was lost, but it is still standing in the local cemetery. Two Czechs - Jihlavians - were also killed in the incident. They were sitting on the tank to show the Russians where the Nazi army was retreating towards Pelhřimov. A German with a half-track followed them, shot the tank with a cannon, and the two Czechs died with the tank crew. There are two graves on the right in the cemetery in Jihlava, with black plaques with the two Czechs' figures engraved - and next to them is the aforementioned memorial but without the five-pointed star."

"Then, at the end of World War II when the Russians camped in our Židovská street, I walked out in front of our house. It was number 25. Today, there's a narrow house next to it, closer to the square. It once had a window and a door on the ground floor. Sadly, it looks different now and ruins the overall appearance. I went out in front of the house to watch the Russians talking. Then a Czech ran up, pointed to the house and shouted: 'There's Germans in there! Germans here!' One of the Soviet soldiers jumped down from the car, pulled a submachine gun with a drum off his shoulder, broke the window with the butt and started shooting furiously into the apartment. There was a lot of noise, bullets flying out of the gun. I ran home crying. Mum asked me what had happened. When I told her everything, she forbade me to leave the house as long as the Russians were there."

"There was a huge shop window with this huge piece of paper that said, 'This is what the parasite had,' and so on.'Former tradesman or shop operator, and this is what we found at their house.' There were two fur coats and three bags of sugar and three bags of flour, all that stuff. In short, they disgraced the person this way, and they couldn't even show up in public afterwards, and then had to face some kind of a jail, a less severe one. In my family, of course, everyone was affected in one way or another. First of all, my father lost his business and got nothing for that. One of my uncles was a builder, they were all builders, and he once built some farm buildings in Rančířov near Jihlava. I even used to ride my bike there during the holidays for a part-time job. Once the secret police came to my uncle's house and found a metal window leaning in his garden near the house. They said he had stolen the window from the Rančířov site and so on, and because he was the son of a former builder, he was stealing socialist property and so on. He went to jail for a year."

"We had huge problems, like suddenly banging on the door. We answered the door and the resident agent was there and said, 'You don't have flags outside your windows.' My father said, 'We have flowers there.' 'Well, you must put up flags there.' We were sent to a shop to get flags, and put two Czechoslovak flags up. The next day there was banging again: 'Why do you have two Czechoslovak flags there? You must have one Soviet and one Czech!' My father was furious and said, 'Excuse me, I'm not going to do that. I'm Czech, so I'm going to put up Czech flags.' Well, of course there was gossip about him... and so on. There were problems. Like, somebody came and knocked on the door saying, 'There's going to be voluntary work.' My father said, 'What's it about?' I experienced that later when I had a family and lived somewhere else. We asked, 'What's the job?' 'Raking the leaves.' So we said, 'What are you going to rake when no leaves have fallen yet?' 'No, there's going to be this work and you have to join in.' We didn't join in, and the next day the resident street agent - no longer a resident house agent- came and said, 'Well, Mr. Vilímek, your children will not be admitted to school because of that.'"

"We moved into our new home at Znojemská 20 in late 1945. That was quite the experience for me. We, a Czech family, were standing in front of the house to move into an apartment vacated by Germans. The Germans were coming right out and we were moving in. They were walking out, a big family, carrying an old lady on a stretcher, and I saw her lying there covered with this blanket like this. I went to her, but suddenly this lady came to me from the German group and said: 'Little boy, don't go too close to our grandmother. She's my grandmother and she's scared and look, she's got this cone in her hand with pepper in it. She fears you're going to steal something from her - and if she throws that pepper in your face it's going to be a big mess, so step aside and stay like that. We'll clear the place and leave.' Then we moved in, they were leaving the square, and we came into the house and it was empty. We went upstairs and we got an apartment on the first floor, and that's where we lived. Now, we came to the apartment and again, imagine the experience: there was a pot of water on the stove, there was coffee, we opened the door to the dining room, and there was a table with cups still on it and stuff."