“What my parents got from their parents, those weren’t many fields. Mum got four hectares from her parents. Dad got three hectares from his. So they had seven hectares altogether. By the time we moved to Bohemia, we had fifteen hectares. Dad kept saving. When someone wanted to sell a field somewhere... People didn’t care for [new] furniture for the kitchen or some kind of fancy stuff. The main thing was to have a field and to have food to eat. People were used to going hungry, so everyone looked to get as many fields as possible, for sustenance.”
“When they were shooting the Jews there, there was one Jankelová who lived in a house on the left side when going in the direction of the city. She tried to escape to our village. She ran to our village, dishevelled, scared out of her wits. Then there was a two-year-old Jewish girl running after people there. She’d gotten lost, or her parents had sent her out like that, thinking they could save her like that. She was crying, people fled before her. Everyone was afraid of her. Whoever helped the Jews got a bullet for himself or his whole family. The way the Germans treated people, it was terrible. Jankelová fled to our village across a corn field. They caught her up and shot her. Then they dragged her off like it was carcass and threw her into a lorry. And they snatched the child by the dress she was wearing and threw her into the lorry like she was just some kind of object. She whimpered, utterly ruined. It was terrible.”
“[Q:What was the worst for you?] It was just that, that we were afraid. Whole families were afraid. In the night, when we went to sleep, we were scared they’d attack us and kill us all, because that happened quite frequently. And the Polish villages... such a big Polish village. The Banderites burnt it to the ground. They set off on wagons, on the move, leaving everything else at home. And one Piniewska forgot something at home, so she went back for it. And as she was running back, the Banderites shot her in the forest. And there were bandits there. In short, no government, people were killed there, no one investigating anything, no one checked who it was, who had killed whom, nothing! They didn’t check it. People were just killed there.”
Marie Košková, née Čmuchálková, was born on 6 February 1931 in the village of České Novosilky, in Horokhiv Raion in Volhynia (Ukraine). Her parents had their own farm in Volhynia, which meant that the whole family was under the threat of being deported to Siberia during Soviet rule. The arrival of the Germans put a stop to that at the last moment. During the German occupation, Marie witnessed the persecution of Jews and Poles by Nazi units and Ukrainian nationalists. She describes the tough life and war-time hardships in Volhynia. Two of Marie’s brothers took part in the Carpatho-Dukla Operation in autumn 1944. One of them died in the Carpathians, the other was heavily injured. In April 1947 she and her whole family remigrated to Czechoslovakia. They settled down near Frýdlant in Liberec District, northern Bohemia. To start with, she helped out on her brother’s farm, later on her parents’ one. Her parents and her brother refused to join the local united agricultural cooperative, and so the Communists gradually confiscated both of the Čmucháleks’ estates. Marie Košková raised four children. She lives in Nové Město pod Smrkem in Liberec District. Marie Košková died on 9 November 2019.
