Marianne Karešová

“I wanted depart after a fortnight, and they forbade it, forbade it. I didn’t have the freedom to leave, and I had to stay there with the children. It was insane. I earned eighty zloty, which was about enough to buy food for one person for a month. Fortunately, my husband’s parents were kind people, good people, and they helped me so I could bring up those two children. They barred me from leaving, and I came pretty close to being put behind bars. After two years, half a year, my husband died.”

“In forty-three the youth joined in the partisan resistance; eleven young students succeeded in derailing a train full of ammunition and soldiers. And there was a big fire near Arras. And those were three classmates from our school, one friend was called Marcel. He still has a street named after him in France. They were fifteen, sixteen years old; eleven of them in all. In the year forty-three, where the marketplace was, they forced us, all of us from the school had to participate in the event. They lined them all up, and the Germans shot them dead.”