“The first victim of the concentration camp was Mrs Nováková. Then Mrs Šroubková died; she was just a year younger than I was. They were foolish people. She was a Czech woman and she told her all that happened in Lidice, and she came back to the block and said: 'Well...' And she went to the electric wires. Some women stopped her and brought me to her because I knew her better. So I slept with her. And then she told me: 'Mr Jiras is also shot dead (meaning Podhora), all men are dead and children are dead too or there are no...' And she kept saying this over and over again. I tried to talk her out of it. Mrs Štubová didn't want to send her to the hospital because she knew she wouldn't be there too long, but she had to. She took her sock off and tried to strangle herself with it...!”
“And there were air raids from the... there where Pepík Horák was... in England. They flew over our camp from England towards Berlin and it was always at ten o'clock. There was a clock in the workroom and we always used to say: 'It's ten o'clock, where are you boys?' We wanted to see them flying! We wanted them to go to Berlin and to hear the planes flying over head. And they came in a while. The German women, who were there, were crying, they were scared because their men were there. And we took the clothes that we had and we slept till the morning.”
“I stopped standing and said nothing. The soldier said nothing either. He only took me to the bedroom, opened the cupboard, I was wearing just my night gown. So he took some dresses and a coat out and wanted me to get dressed. I only nodded and he gave me the coat and the dress, a blue one, a woollen one with white collar, I remember that. And he wanted me to get dressed. I would have to take my night gown off so I shook my head. So he held the coat and I put it on the night gown. And he put the dress over my arm and he took my other arm and led me to the staircase...”
“Once when they butchered a pig at home, (they also had a farm) they sent me haggis and some bread with it. But we didn't go to pick up the parcels ourselves. Those who couldn't work went there. When we were needed at work, for example, they went there. And the girls said: 'She cut a half of the haggis for you.' She cut a half of it because I could become sick. I had just a tiny bit of it because we shared it all...”
Miloslava Jirasová, former Podhorová, neé Studničková, was born on November 27th, 1913 in Lidice. She is the younger of two sisters; daughter of Bohumil Studnička, (a farmer from Velké Přítočno) and Pavla Studničková, neé Zimová from Lidice. She spent her childhood in Lidice. Her parents owned a farm there. They bred cattle and farmed 37 hectare of land. A part of the farm included a mill, which was being rented, and a famous lake in Lidice. She went to primary school in Lidice for five years and then she continued in Buštěhrad. At the age of fifteen her parents enrolled her at the Family High School in Prague for one year. She married Jaroslav Podhora in 1933. They worked together with the Studnička family on about 70 hectare of land. Their childless marriage ended up with the slaughter of Lidice men on June 10th, 1942. Miloslava with her Mom and other Lidice women were deported to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück. Both of them survived the war and returned to Czechoslovak in 1945. She lived together with her Mom at her sister’s in Stehelčeves until 1947. In this year she married for the second time to Karel Jiras, and together they moved to Bykoš. The Jiras family lost their land after 1948 and worked for the local Collective Farming organization. They had two children. Miloslava Jirasová worked until 1983, at which time she retired.
