Vladimír Ficek

"As soon as I cross the border of Czechoslovakia, I’ll lie down on the floor. I have my father's address, I don’t know where it is, but I’ll give it to the conductor and let them take me there. I have no idea where that will be. So I went, we crossed the border, Čop, the train stopped. People were getting off, I looked out the window and stared. At the station, there was this huge portrait - two meters wide and five meters tall- Stalin! And I thought to myself: Dear God, I escaped one Stalin and ended up with another."

"The girls went into the village, also looking for food. In one part of the village there were Germans, and one of them had a flock of sheep. They took one of his sheep, he shouted at them, but they ignored him. They brought the sheep home, slaughtered it, and feasted. He complained to the Americans. The Americans then assigned police to keep watch. I think the ones who guarded us most were the forced laborers—they treated us very well. That German complained to the Americans. 'Who hurt you?' they asked. So the German brought them to the camp and said, 'These women.' And when the women saw it was that German, they immediately broke off branches and started beating him across the back. The German was glad to escape. The American just laughed."

"When they evicted the kulaks, the houses remained empty. Russians from Russia started moving in. Apparently, the poorer folks moved around just like the Czechs did here after the Germans left. It was the same over there. The government set up national committees. And of course, those committees were made up entirely of newcomers - Russians. And then they ran wild! There weren’t any proper laws yet, and they said Lenin had declared: ‘Vlast na mestách’ - meaning whatever the local government deems appropriate, that’s the law. And the state apparently needed money. So every village was assigned a tax they had to pay. The national committee, made up of those Russians, had to divide up who would pay it. And they did it in a way that everyone except themselves had to pay—they didn’t pay anything."

"Everyone survived only on what they could harvest from their little garden. But there wasn’t much- there was hunger. And the kolkhoz- they gathered livestock together, but they didn’t have much feed either. Where could they get it? Eventually, the animals started dying. Horses - there was a place set up where they brought the carcasses. When a horse died and people found out, those who heard about it would rush to the spot where the dead horse was being taken. As soon as it arrived, people tore it apart- because there was nothing to eat."

"And Grandpa Ficek - they were deported out past Chelyabinsk, into an empty field. First, they had to build some kind of living quarters. This is how it was done: the topsoil, the turf, was cut into square pieces, about 10–15 cm thick, and stacked one on top of the other to form walls. They dug about a meter into the ground, and from those turf blocks they built walls about a meter above ground. There were forests nearby, so they felled trees, laid beams across the top, threw branches over them, and then covered it all with soil - that was the roof."