“Several reports about those days in May have already been made and people have written about it, but I have never heard or read anything about Ms. Matulová, who worked in the town hall as a clerk and who was there as well [among the hostages]. When they were taking the individual groups for execution, they made her get on a tank, but during the first transport they told her to go home to say good-bye because they would shoot her, too. And since she was afraid that if she had not come back they would have shot her entire family, she came back to the tank and they were even so cruel that they were asking her whether she wanted them to shoot her in her heart, or head, and she told them that she wanted to be shot in her heart. And they were carrying her around like this and eventually, when the executions were over, they let her go. So she was the only one who has remained alive from that group... I don’t know, perhaps because she did not want to speak about it, or because she was not included among those who had been executed. A total of 108 persons died in Meziříčí.”
“It was in the afternoon, around two o’clock when an alarm was raised in the village because one villager, Mr. Drápela, went to see the field and he saw many soldiers on the hill there. He believed that they were Germans, because it seemed to him that the army looked dark. And so he quickly ran to the village and he shouted that Gestapo was there. All the people got scared and they hid or they ran away. I was grazing the geese and some woman, Mrs. Svobodová, told me: ‘Mařenka, take your geese and run home, there are many Gestapo men at Famfula’s wood, so run away and hide somewhere.’ I was running home, at home they already knew it and we wanted to run away outside to the fields. But we could already hear the galloping horses and my father was quite courageous and he looked up from our garden, because the road was below our garden, and he found out that they were Soviets. And so he called out: ‘They are our people!’ and people in the neighbouring houses heard it, because in moments like this one is listening to what is happening, right. They came out of their houses, and up there they already knew it, too, an they were giving a welcome to the Red Army. I hid myself behind a small apple tree, but I summoned courage and I could see that there were about five horses in the first row and in the middle there was a white horse and a woman was sitting on it. And our soldiers were galloping behind it. At first there were soldiers riding horses, and they followed by cars with soldiers, and with pontoon cars, too. At that time nobody actually knew what it was. The old soldiers from World War I were arguing what it was. They were talking about the weapons of those soldiers, too, they did not know the Kalashnikovs. And they had some cannons, too, but there were no tanks, the tanks did not pass through our village. It took about two hours and I know that my father commented: ‘Why this Joseph - he meant Stalin - why this Joseph has so many soldiers with him?’ Well, there were many of thehm.”
“There was a family in Meziříčí that came from the Kubiš family. They were transported to the concentration camp in Terezín, too. At first their parents, then the children, and their grandpa was there living with them, he was over ninety years old. And he told them: ‘Arrest me too.’ They replied: ‘You will not run away from us.’ They were in Terezín, I don’t know for how long, and they were the first generation that has come back. Apart from them, the generations which were closer to the Kubiš family, I think that up to the seventh generation, had been all shot dead. These people were the first generation that has returned. And they were ordered not to speak about anything that they had seen there, otherwise they would get imprisoned as well. Well, from time to time we would learn something from them. When they walked from the train station they were hungry and so they stopped at the baker’s because their son Lambert had worked or apprenticed for the baker Mr. Šlapal. And so they stopped by and he gave them food. And then they walked through the back alleys and paths, because people used to walk there a lot and not on the roads, and they walked past their field and little Frantík cut of a head of cabbage there and he brought it home. And I remember that people were giving them and bringing them some food. I know that my mom was giving them lard. We had a lot of lard because we were raising pigs.”
Massacre in Velké Meziříčí
Marie Nejedlá was born on April 1, 1932 in Lhotky near Velké Meziříčí. From the time she was a little girl she remembers the events related to the massacre which took place in May 1945 when the retreating German army arrested and executed more than fifty citizens of the town. Her parents had a farm and they were raising pigs. Marie’s father worked as a warehouse worker and her mother was a seamstress. Her uncle was involved in the resistance movement.