Naděžda Kantová

"We were grown by then; I went to the orthopaedist and spoke to her. I told her my dad had been in a concentration camp. When we did something and he came home, he didn't beat us: he literally kicked us so hard I couldn't even sit up. The physician said, 'It wasn't his fault; he should have gotten psychotherapy.' There was no such therapy after the war, and so we took the brunt of it." - "What about your mother, how did she cope?" - "She got kicked too."

"Past Okříšky, there is a village called Petrovice, and in between there were fields like there are today with these baulks in between. This is where we would all lay down at the end of the war. The villagers came and said, 'Be quiet kids - if you so little as speak, the Germans will come and shoot everybody.' We hid behind the baulk as cars drove past. There's a gas station now. The cars would stop there and soldiers changed from cars to trucks to make the column shorter, and drove away. Cars and tanks were on fire there; we would lift our heads up and watch it all blow up and burn. It was terrible. I wouldn't want to experience that again." - "Were the burning cars there during the air raid?" - "No, they burned as the Germans were leaving. They set the cars on fire - the Germans - to shorten the convoy. They got on the big trucks and drove off to Jihlava. There were tanks and cars burned down past Okříšky on the way to Jihlava. They set fire to them and drove away."

"And when we went to the forest, for example, we were ordered not to collect anything in the forest. That there were such boxes or as oval as eggs. And they told us it was grenades or mines, and if we took it in our hand, we would die, it would explode. How many times had I seen them lying by a tree, but it never occurred to me that I would take it, nobody. Then they went and collected it, like adults."

"I was actually small during wartime, and dad was locked up. He was... I was three years old, so they locked him up for having flyers like the Germans and alike. Well, they locked in a lot of people there, like, I remember my mom and I were going to the city, to the village, and watching them being taken away by truck.”

"We always ran away or we went to Petrovice in the fields. And there used to be like fields and always large lanes, so we lay below those lanes. And there were more of us from the village. And the adults told us not to say anything else, or else they would shoot us. Well, the Germans left Třebíč, via Okříšky to Jihlava, and they always set something on fire... they got into a truck, for example, and set the passengers on fire. The tanks were burning along the way, it was just banging, we were crouched, we didn’t say a word. And when we stuck our heads out a little, our parents always pushed us down so that we wouldn't be seen."