Amálie Fojtíková

"This is a story from the prison that I went through. The cell was so small, with two iron beds. There often were so many of us on them. I was the youngest. I slept on bare ground, wearing just the coat I had. Bare ground, and rime on the wall. Do you know how we lived there? Hunger, cold, bugs, lice, horrible. Every afternoon, we knocked on the wall and got messages through the window. We put a stool on the window, I was the youngest so I would get in the window and listen to where Russians were, where the armies were, simply how the front was moving. Well, stupid me, I looked out the window, the Gestapo were ready in the yard and saw me. I jumped down but they came to the cell in a moment, pulled me out and asked what I had heard. I said: 'Nothing, we hadn't spoken yet. We just signalled.' So they said they'd put me in the cellar where there are rats and they will eat me until I remember. So they dragged me one floor, two floors, three floors down to the cellar. And in front of the cellar: 'What did you hear?' I said: 'Nothing.' So they threw me back in the cell. They locked the windows and said: 'Die here, you swines. There's your dining room, toilet, bath, everything.' We took water from the toilet. There was no water. We put water from the toilet to the drinking jug. They never opened the window for us. That's how we were imprisoned until the end of the war."

"We worked all winter, skiing; in the morning, it was: 'Kids, come clear the traces.' They slept some in the night and left in the morning, because Germans would come all the time. An entire SS was seated in the chateau in Hošťálková, across the mountains. The units would walk through the mountains all the time. There were many of them, and they would make clear paths, so every morning when snow fell, we skied over them and cleared them off."

"When they burned us down, three boys from trenches in Josefov came there. They escaped from the trenches. They found the place burned, and there was a cellar that was not burned. There was some straw in there and they got in to sleep there. It was cold, it was in March. But the SS watched it all the time. They waited for someone else to show up, hoping to catch some more guerrillas. That's how they found the boys, and the boys said they wanted to join the guerrillas too. And they misled them. They pretended to be with them. Then at night, one German went to Hošťálková and came back with a commando. They surrounded the cellar and took them out. One of them was shot in the legs, he fell and burned to death in the straw. He was buried under a tree after the war. There was a beech tree near where we lived. It is still engraved in it. I showed it to the man who wrote the chronicle. All that was there. That he was buried there; his name was Jiří and he was from Josefov."