“Since I am the kind of person who likes being home, the worst thing for me was that we did not have a permanent place to sleep. We never knew where we would sleep next. We were like little animals: when we were tired, we lay down, wherever it was. There was nobody who would have offered a shelter for us, anyway. All the local people were afraid of us. Those who had crossed the front line with us did not have a place to sleep themselves, and we thus slept wherever we could find a place.”
“My father was the only one in the village who had a motorcycle. Nižná Polianka had some twenty or twenty-two houses. When my father arranged with that Russian man from Ufa that he would go there, this man drew maps for him and explained when and where he would be able to ride. He was not allowed to ride during the day. We could only go at night and only in certain sections. We rode the motorcycle for ten nights. We always slept somewhere during the day and in the evening we went to wash ourselves to a brook, and then we got on the motorcycle and kept going. I think that those areas were so poor that the people did not even dare to ask who was riding the motorcycle. The officials prohibited all movement of people during the days. We could only go at nights.”
“When I left the life in the forest it was like this. I got sick to the extent that I became unable to walk, and I thus lived in the house of the Stivar family in Slavkov. The director Staněk said that I would not go anywhere and that he would get me a proper doctor to have a look at me. They had a little room in their basement where they stored things that they did not need. They made a bed for me there. The entrance to that room was made in a way that they cut out a square in the floor in the corridor about eighty by eighty centimetres, and placed a ladder there, and I had to descend that ladder if I wanted to go down. I spent about three weeks in that basement. A doctor with his assistant came there three weeks later and told me to dress up because they would take me home and get a doctor for me there. They got a doctor from Veselí nad Moravou and they helped me get into a car and they took me to Vnorovy, where the doctor said that I would not be allowed to get out of bed for one month.”
Miluška Zedníčková, née Břečková, was born May 30, 1924 in Nižná Polianka in north-eastern Slovakia. Her stories sometimes border on the incredible. She claims that in the 1930s she used totravel secretly with her father to Ufa in the Soviet Union, which was nearly three thousand kilometres away. Her father‘s friend from the army from WWI lived there, and Miluška even remembers that her father brought Dajan Bajanovich Murzin to Czechoslovakia before WWII, who later became the well-known commander of the 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka. Immediately after the declaration of Slovak independence on March 14, 1939, the family had to leave this newly established state within twenty-four hours. They found a new home in her father‘s native village Vnorovy. In autumn 1944 a small partisan unit was formed in this village, and later it became incorporated in the 1st unit Slavkov- Kuriněnko in the 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka. Miluška Zedníčková joined the partisans and she took part in several acts of sabotage and gunfights, and she also helped to deliver messages to other partisan units. She became ill after having suffered a penetration wound of her leg, and she was then hiding at home until the end of the war. She now lives in Krnov.
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