Marie Zajícová

The state was run by idiots "Did you believe it would ever end? How did you see the prospect?" - "I didn't think much about it. I thought it would never end. I mean, it was terrible. Such idiots running the country! The village secretary came to our village, and he wrote a public notice, for the village, three lines, and he had eight grammatical errors in it. And we, children, took a red pencil, and we marked the mistakes for him. He was a trained bricklayer. And he used to say, 'My hands will never work again.'"

"My uncle was such a progressive farmer, so I guess that's why he went first. Well, then they told him that his cows were thin, [it was] because they took their grain and all their fodder to the state-owned farms, so he had nothing to feed them. They said he had skinny cows, that it was a sabotage,that they were sabotaging."

"I was about eight years old then, after the war. I was looking out the window and they were going in the wagons, everybody had a little bundle, adults, young children, and I felt so sorry for them and I was crying. And I thought, 'If Hitler had won, this is how we would be going and who knows where.'"

“We were ordered to provide accommodation for them and to let them inside our house; they were to spend the night there. Well, we were also told to lend them some blankets and so we lent them blankets and they slept in the barn. They probably had their own food, because, I don’t know, but they didn´t go to us for eating. Well, and they were Hungarians, for example, all kinds of nationalities that were fighting with the Germans. And then on the following day they were leaving and they left an unexploded grenade in between our gate. I don’t know if they dropped it, or if they had placed it there on purpose.”