Jiří Voženílek

„I and my brother spent a lot of time running around, looking for something interesting. In the fields, we found a German car, it was abandoned. A sort of small lorry and there was probably a radio inside. And I found a case of tobacco and a case of schnapps there. We grabbed it. Maybe there were other things, too, but we were only interested in those. We took it all home. Our father was a chain smoker so he was happy about it. So we messed around and found another case. We opened the case. Accidentally, the local policeman was passing by so he threw us in the ditch and lay over us. There was an anti-personnel mine inside. He took us home and explained what a kind of hero he was. He was a hero and I and my brother got locked up in the basement so sinde that time, I don’t know much.”

„There were no fridges so mom had to boil the milk every time. Or else it would go sour in summer. That [Mrs.] Navarová, when she found out that there was milk left to cool and there’s skin on top which she loved, so she dug up the skin with her finger and ate the skin. Mom was terribly angry so they had a catfight and yelled at each other. The Navarová went and snitched on her because mom was a Sokol member and she was from Kolín where the Kmoch band was and that was something like the modern bands today, those polkas and Viennese waltzes. She used to go dancing there. There were Sokol balls and masquerades and all sort of social events. She used to sing the Kmoch song. And Kmoch had composed many marches, these were nice to sing and they were mostly sung by the Sokols. Parents were invited to the Gestapo. About two weeks. They were not too happy. When it was going on at the Gestapo, there were mostly people from the Sudeten in the lower positions, because when there was a higher ranking officer, for example from Berlin, he would speak perfect German. And he would perfectly tell you what to do, what to say and so on. But you, as a Czech, knew perfect Czech so all you could say was ‘I don’t understand you’. The Gestapo officer was bilingual and he talked with them but he was a decent person. The war has not started yet after all. He said: ‘Look, Mr. Voženílek, I’ll tell you a thing. You know who is sitting next to you? Your wife. Your wife sings Sokol songs and those are banned. If she wanted to sing them again, you will slap her on her face. I would not happy to beat her because she is a mother of two children.’”