Štěpánka Kaliková

“”Life was hard. We had to ski or use snowshoes. Those were small wooden planks tied to the shoes so that you could walk on the surface and you didn’t sink in the show. Like this we got to the main road, we let the skis or the snowshoes by the road. Nobody would take them. Then we would go to the shop and come back and go back up the hills again. You had to make the shopping for the whole week. When something was missing we just had to do without it. Not like here where you can come to the shop anytime you need.”

“I thought that they will put him on work somewhere. He didn’t have any good boots and he didn’t have the right clothes so I went to Bílá where they kept the prisoners in some barn to give him proper boots. I came to the office and I had to say hello in German and I saw all the rifles and pistols on the table and my heart stopped for a while. I wasn’t sure if I’d walk out of there alive. What would then happen with the child. I told them I brought proper boots if the prisoners had to do heavy work. They said they won’t give him the boots that he wouldn’t need them. They thought I hid a message in the sole or something which wasn’t true. The prisoners were kept in Bílá for three days and then the Germans thought that the partisans could come to free them so they tied them together. Always two and two so that they could not move. After a week or two they took them to Ostrava. He was in Ostrava for about six weeks and I came to change his clothes twice. Then he was transported to Brno.”

“We were very sad about it. It was a group of about eight or ten partisans and they were on the way from Martiňák to Karlovice so they must have passed the house of the Myslikovjan and the Pavlíček family. It was strictly forbidden to let the partisans to the house and people had to report any movement of the partisans. Nobody did that right away, everybody waited for some time that the partisans could would get to a safe distance. I don’t know who reported that and how close were they behind the partisans. It was a lot of snow and it must have been difficult for them to move across the land. Then they came back after two weeks or a month, I’m not sure. And they came to the house of the Myslikovjan family and asked for the boys. They took one of the Myslikovjan boys and one from the Pavlíček family and took their watches. There was a field behind the house. A small field uphill and then the wood as anywhere else. They took them across the field in the direction of Martiňák and then they shot them dead. They were just boys, one was seventeen and the other one eighteen.” (Mrs Kaliková speaks about the Pavlíček family but she probably means the Polách family which lived in the house with the Myslikovjans – author’s note).

“They took him to Brno and he was there for about three weeks. I was allowed one visit so I went there to the Kounice dormitories but they told me he was taken somewhere else. They didn’t say where but at that time he was already dead. He had been executed. After the war, I went to the Kounice dormitories. I thought I would have an opportunity to speak to some witnesses or to find some records. I was showed a place behind the building covered with sand where they took the prisoners in their underwear and shot them from behind. What happened to the body, I don’t know.”

“I went home and I saw a group of Germans, if they were from Gestapo or the army I don’t know, on the way to the house of the Tkáč family. They were coming through the woods so that the partisans, who usually had somebody on the lookout, wouldn’t spot them. They came to the house and broke in. The partisans jumped out. They had boots under the oven to dry out so they took the boots and run up to the hill to hide in the woods. It was already cold and there was already snow on the ground. But not all of them managed to get out. Some of them were shot dead, as it is written here that three of them were killed. One of them was injured with his head covered with blood. They tied him to a car with a rope and pulled him behind. So he must have been dead by the time they came to wherever they went. The other partisans escaped. And I think there is a memorial now at Lhotská for the commander of the partisan unit.” (The memorial on the site reads: On 17th November 1944, Soviet partisans Syrotin Artějenovič Zachar, Pavel Kudelja, resistance fighter Griška and others were killed in the fight with German fascists, author’s note)