Lydie Husovská

“I have one more nice recollection of my mom. This made me very proud of her. She never taught us to hate or resent the Germans. She always used to say: ‘kids, remember, a German is a German and will stay a German. Good Germans are very rare’. After the war the Germans became the object of universal hatred. The Russians were driving the German prisoners from the school you stood at all the way to those barns over there. The Germans were barefoot, half-naked and beaten up. We were just kids but I still remember that grizzly scene very well. We opened the gate to our yard just a little bit and watched the martyrdom of the Germans that was unfolding before our eyes. I stood there with my brother and I remember that I felt really sorry for the Germans. The drummer kept tirelessly announcing that handing food or drink to the Germans will be punished immediately. We weren’t allowed to pay attention to them. Nobody was. Me and my brother, Zdeněk, were standing in the gate and watching, and all of a sudden one of the German prisoners pushed us aside and rushed inside our yard. My mom just walked out of the pigsty where she was milking the cows. When he saw her, he got down on his knees and started to beg her. She looked at him, pulled him up and handed him the jar with milk. He drank almost all of that milk, gasped, thanked my mom and disappeared from our yard. I told my mom: ‘mom, we could get arrested for this’. She said: ‘remember, he was human’.”

“When we were alone with my mom… and we were alone for a long time, the Communists were troubling us. They wanted to build a huge playground on our gardens and parcels. They tried to persuade our neighbor but he was a man and could defend himself, he could object and put up arguments against it. So they thought to themselves: ‘let’s try it next door, it’s just women living there. It will be much easier. Let’s push her a bit and she will sign it. And as soon as we have her signature, her neighbors will eventually have to agree as well and we’ll be building a huge playground. Well, I was already grown up, about eighteen years old, so my mom said: ‘come with me’. They were pushing us hard, trying to get what they wanted. They even went at it from a political angle. I knew that they tried the same thing with our neighbor and with my uncle. I couldn’t bear it anymore so I told them: ‘you’re being so tough with us only because we’re just two women. If my dad was here, you wouldn’t dare to push that hard’. One of the comrades reacted by jumping up from his chair and shouting: ‘if he didn’t meddle in, he would be here today with us’. I replied to him: ‘If he and people like him didn’t meddle in, you wouldn’t be here today’, and I stood up and walked away, slamming the door behind me. When we came home my mom burst in tears. ‘They will arrest you, they will arrest you’. I told her: ‘mom, I just couldn’t take it anymore’.”

“It had all been pre-agreed. They spoke about it before the Kratochvíl siblings went into exile. They allegedly agreed on it with my dad in our summer kitchen. My mom was roasting chicken and they were sitting there with my dad and talking about something. She didn’t know what they were talking about. There was one more man present at this conversation. His name was Emil Vlk and he was from the local orphanage. He went into exile together with them. When they crossed the borders, they separated and Emil Vlk went his own way. He then fought in the ground troops and by chance he met a guy from Nosislav in the trenches. It was a certain Mr. Sedla, who fled from the Protectorate independently from their group. Mr. Sedla confirmed after the war that he was present when Emil Vlk fell in battle. But that was a different group. My dad was in touch with Ludvík Kratochvíl. The Kratochvíl siblings split up on their way out of the Protectorate. Jarda became a tank crew member and Ludvík was supposed to come back to the Protectorate. He was supposed to be air landed here.”

“We used to have a republican emblem in one of our rooms. My dad hid a photo behind it. The photo depicted our first president Masaryk sitting next to our later president Beneš. They were sitting side by side and there was a bunch of mums in front of them. I liked that picture very much. The Nazis were at our home conducting a house search. They turned everything upside down and knocked the emblem down. As it fell down the picture with the presidents appeared. The German looked at it and trampled that Beneš, leaving, however, Masaryk intact. My mom always used to say: ‘That German swine nevertheless recoiled at the sight of Masaryk’. The only thing I remember from that scene is my mom standing in the middle of the room and holding on to my brother. We had a nanny that was present to the incident and she never really recovered from it. She said it was a tremendous shock for her to watch it happening. She just couldn’t forget it for all of her life. She kept telling everybody about it. Her whole family had to listen to the story over and over again. Her five children knew the story from her mom. Well, where is dad now? My mom said he’s working on the field. Well, but where?”