Karel Beniš

“My father [called out to me]: ‘Come on, come on! You don’t have to jump around out there. Come lead my horse for me,’ when he was plowing or something. I was walking… I hold him up as a role model—some teacher named Špaček called on me, and I didn’t know it. So he said to me, ‘Sit down, Karel. Once you’ve learned this, raise your hand. I saw that you were leading your dad’s horse until it got dark, so that’s excusable.’”

“My father always said that the Germans were trying to find out if he was supporting the partisans. They knew he was supporting them, but they couldn’t prove it. Around three o’clock in the morning, they sent a German over—the excuse was that he needed a little water for his car’s radiator. My father called out from the bedroom: ‘There’s a stream right nearby; there’s plenty of water there. I don’t open the door for anyone at night.’ That was the end of it. But he couldn’t let it go, so in the morning he sent my mother to the office to say that someone had been knocking on our door, just to cover his tracks. There, they made excuses and didn’t admit that they were trying to see if… If he’d opened the door and started talking to that man, they would have known he was in contact with the partisans.”