"My brother, when he was eight years old, would stroll around in the woods, wearing a board on his shoulder. He sought a place where he could build a hideout on a tree. He would always go a bit further and throw his board there. So they made a hole for him there – it was made of a few boards and some straw. My father would bring him his meal every day. Then, when it came, there was no snow, yet. About four days later, we got a lot of snow. Daddy visited him. He made himself a pair of stilts. He walked as if he went to Bernátky but then he jumped into the woods on his stilts and so he managed to cover any traces. My mother cooked well for him, she would add some bread that he would have for dinner and maybe even for breakfast."
"Murzin got close to Kněhyně and he collapsed there somewhere by the stream. He must have fainted somehow, from the pain. In the morning, someone was knocking on the window, the dog was barking. So my dad quickly jumped out of the bed and opened the window. He said: 'Who is it? What's going on?' The response was: 'open the door!' the stranger spoke Russian but you could understand. So my dad got out quickly. 'What's going on?' The stranger said he was wounded in his foot, so he took him inside and treated him. Then he told him that he couldn't leave him in the house because the surrounding forests were full of Gestapo men. So he took him under his shoulders and led him into a bunker, which was not far from our house, and hid him in the hay."
"My father repaired his boots because he was also a shoemaker. So he sewed up his boots very nicely - there was a bullet hole in his boot. But as it was already some four or five days since the Germans had left, the wound was inflamed. We did not want to go to the doctor. So we used what we could find at home. He had a mirror that he broke up and used the fragments to carve out the inflamed flesh. You know, it must have hurt like hell. My father brought him some home-made lard that he used as a balm on his foot and it then began to heal. It took two weeks and then, when the snow had melted, Murzin would every now and then come to our house to warm up a little and to take some rest. So he would stay with us for a bit. But in the morning, before dawn, he headed into his bunker since he couldn't stay in the house during the day."
"In the winter, we would have two meters of snow there. At those times, we would not be able to go to school. Just once a week or once in two weeks to get our homework and that was all. For me, school wasn't that far away. I had to walk only fifteen minutes to get to school and so I would run down the hill. But for the others, the way to school took an hour. From Martinák, or Bařiny, or from Skureč or Mečová. It took very long for them to get to school. So we had wooden snowshoes and there were these buckles that prevented us from dipping entirely into the snow. And if these were not available, we walked up to our waist in snow."
"Then, in 1943, the Hitlerjugend organization became a lot more active in Czechoslovakia. They would come to the school I attended and try to recruit people. They tried to lure us by promising to teach us some martial arts. We said: 'Yeah, we'll go, we'll go.' They arrived, a whole bunch of men, and they waited for us on a small grassy place bellow our school building. But we wouldn't come. We have all agreed not to go there and while they were marching and parading there, we were hidden behind the trees, watching them with mockery. As they were finally walking away then, we were throwing cones after them and some boys would even throw stones, but they didn't hit them since they were already too far away. Nobody joined the Hitlerjugend. They came twice to our school and then they didn't come ever again."
"He had to get up already. The Gestapo men attacked him with their rifle butts and battered him badly until he started to bleed form his nose and mouth. My mom grabbed the younger one. We did not see it, but I saw the beating with the rifles and that my father got the first slap. We were brought outside of the room, me, my cousin and my brother, to the hallway, into the hall and I stood between those doorframes. These were massive wooden doorframes. As I was standing there that German asked me if the Russians were in our house and if didn't see any partisans around. I said no, that I hadn't seen anybody around and that we used to sleep at night. I got slapped in the face and I hit my head on that one side of the doorframe. Then I got slapped from the other side and I hit the other side of the doorframe with my head. My brother and cousin were spared, but they were interrogated as well. My brother was some eight, nine years old."
Miroslava Kaštovská, née Tkáčová, was born in 1931 in the secluded settlement, Znajka, between Čeladná and Horní Bečva. Only the Tkáč family lived in the seclusion amidst the forests of the Beskidy Mountains. Life there had been very hard even before the war broke out. Since 1944, guerrillas from the Jan Žižka Brigade began appearing in the neighborhood seeking a place to hide. The partisans would often visit the home of Miroslava and her family. Their house also became the hiding place for the equipment of an airborne landing with the code-name “Wolfram”. The family thus lived in great danger because even these secluded places in the mountains sometimes were visited by the Gestapo. Nevertheless, the family helped the paratroopers and their home, for a few weeks, became the hiding place for the severely injured guerrilla-group leader and chief of staff of the Žižka Brigade Dajan Bajanovič Murzin. It was just at the time of Tetřev operation, when 13,000 German troops sealed off the mountain area with the order to break the guerrilla resistance in the area. Murzin could eventually be saved but it cost the life of Miroslava’s father, who was arrested by the Gestapo after he had been betrayed by the informer, Emil Muroň. Her father later died in prison and her mother was briefly imprisoned as well. After the war, the family moved away and some time later, the Znajka secluded placen ceased to exist. Today Miroslava Kaštovská lives in Opava.
