Milada Kolářová

“Then Mum, me, my sister and also Mrs Říhová, we were all in one cell, but the cell was a big, long room, and there were bunk beds in threes, three bunks above each other, and altogether there were eighty of us there. You can imagine how squashed we were. The first night we didn’t have where to sleep because there was no room in the bunks. So we got a blanket, a bowl, that was a clay bowl, and a wooden spoon. That was our equipment. So we had to lie on the floor. The three of us all on one blanket, and we covered ourselves with the other two. Of course, it was cold, the window had to be kept ajar because that many people needed to have air. We got food. We got soup for supper, it was supposed to be some kind of cabbage soup or what. Well, something that I would never, ever put in my mouth, but I was glad that it was warm. So that was the only thing we ate that day. But at the entrance when we arrived, they wrote RU into our papers, which meant ‘return undesirable’. But then our fellow inmates saw - because there were really a lot of really kind women, really kind women there - so they said: ‘They can’t sleep on the floor.’ So they somehow made some more room in the bunk beds and took us in among themselves.”

“They approached, the army, simply, they surrounded it. They approached and herded the neighbours in front of them. They were afraid that [we’d] start shooting. And they had with them Alexandra Panchenko, she was one of the group that had landed with Kiš, and the Germans had captured her immediately, right on the spot they had. So they had her captive so that she could recognise Kiš. So they pushed her ahead in front of them. Well, and we, my parents when they saw her and saw what was happening, they went out and Panchenko asked: ‘Is Kiš here?’ Mum and Dad said: ‘No.’ You could see the enormous relief on her face. We met her later on in Terezín. And so then, when they knew that Kiš wasn’t there, they weren’t afraid any more they tore into the yard, tied Dad to the walnut tree, stood us women facing the wall, and the soldiers began looting. All sorts of things all over the place, and then they said the captive should come out of hiding. So we had to undo the cover and tell Afanas that everything was lost and that he can’t shoot, because it’s unimaginable, impossible. So he came out, they captured him and calmly took him with them to the car. They didn’t do anything to him. He just didn’t mean anything to them, he was just a captive.”

“But then Bohouš was arrested near Hradiště. It came I don’t know where from, somewhere from the mountains from the partisans there. He was betrayed, he was at the Gestapo. He didn’t tell them anything, nothing about where Kiš was. The Germans already knew about Kiš. But he told them nothing, they put him in the cooler, he suffered terribly, awfully. And when they were at their wits’ end, they put him in a cell, and with him they planted the former Czechoslovak officer Navara from Česká Třebová, who was also imprisoned and couldn’t take any more of it, and so to help himself and ease the pain, he got it all out of Bohouš.”