Gabriela Binková

“I was already dating my husband at that time and we wanted to marry. My husband’s sister kept urging me that we ought to marry so that I would not have to go to Germany. She thought that when I became married, I would not have to go to Germany. When Laďa’s cousin’s parents learnt about it, they quickly married her off. However, his cousin was married for less than two months when she received the notice to go to Germany. She said that she would go. When the girls came for her to go to the railway station together, she told them that she would be right back. She went outside and she hanged herself. She had been married for two months and she hanged herself. Laďa’s sister came to us and told us that we did not need to marry, that Mařenka had hanged herself. That even though her parents quickly married her off, it was of no use. We thus didn’t marry with Laďa. I told him: ‘You can stay single, I will be single, and we will meet afterwards. You will be free to do whatever you want. And I will stay single as well, we will both be single.’ We eventually did not marry each other. Mařenka did marry, and it didn’t help her either. There was the order to go, and nothing could be done about it.”

“I received an order that we were to go to Germany. We came to the railway station and they were calling out names and telling us which carriage we were to board. There were many of us on the platform, not just a few people. There were a lot of us. People from each company were calling out names of those who were to go to work for them. When he called our names, he said: ‘You need to wait in the carriage number this and that.’ He called out about twenty-six or twenty-eight of us girls and eight boys. We were going to work in the same factory. We were about nineteen years old. What do you want to do when you are nineteen? Well, I was already twenty, because my birthday is in January, and we went in March. We thus went there. We stayed in a hotel there, not like people in other places who lived in labour camps. Like Mrs. Jeřábková, or Božka Hochmanová, for example, who went to a labour camp, because they were sent to Linz or some other large cities while we went to a tiny town.”