Karel Krušina

"Dad and Mom listened to foreign radio, which did not escape the attention of my older brother, who was thirteen at the time. And under the influence of these reports and information that Tito's partisans are in the mountains of Yugoslavia, my brother and his two friends in their boyish naivety decided to leave for Yugoslavia. Because my brother knew well the border between the Sudetenland, Svitavy and Letovice, they devised a plan to take the train to Semanin, then cross the border to Svitavy and buy tickets to Belgrade for stamps. They waited for the express train to arrive at midnight, which drove from Berlin via Ústí nad Orlicí to the Balkans. However, they were tired, fell asleep and were awakened by a military patrol that accompanied them down below the Gestapo station. The boys were interrogated there, given a big spanking, and my brother even lost some teeth there. Nobody heard about them at home for three days. Three days later, the news arrived at the gendarme station in Újezd that they were on the Gestapo in Svitavy for their parents to come for them. "

"After the year 1950, we lived in Stvolová, in that small farm. Mom took the rented fields back and we started farming. But the union collective farm was established and they came to my mother to put the field in the collective farm. But my mother barely planted the fields and we were expecting a harvest, we also had some animals, chickens, a goat, rabbits and so on ... she didn't want to give them the fields. And so she had to do it, they took away our food stamps. At the beginning, all citizens received the food stamps, but when they took them away from us and everything was rationed, we were actually without the opportunity to buy something for three months. "

"My mother and I arrived by bus at the station in Klánovice, next to which stood the Smolík Hotel. Hitler's youth, the Hitlerjugend, were staying at the Smolík Hotel. It was like a summer camp. I was standing in front of the bus as they were walking out of the hotel, because the hotel was located in a forest setting. So they were leaving the hotel and one of them looked at me and shouted: 'Du tschechische Schwein, du tschechische Hund.' My mom didn't hesitate and slapped him. Hurting Hitler's child was equivalent to being sent to a concentration camp, but my mom spoke perfect German, and when the supervisor ran after her, she said to her in German: 'You're raising the Führer's children well. We bring workers here to ČKD, to the factories, to help our Wehrmacht. And this is how you raise them?' And she fell silent, not knowing what to say, and nothing happened to us."

"The occupation was at its peak, and it was necessary to get everything that was Czech—and not German—from Brněnec, Březová, and Chrastová to Moravia. And my mother took part in this herself, along with her nephew and brother-in-law. They transported the town school in Březová to Letovice. All the equipment. And they transported everything that the entrepreneur Löw-Beer could transport, everything he managed to take. And they transported it to Svitávka, because the Löw-Beer factory was also located there. And when the last bus left, it was filled with rolls of wool – he also produced wool for knitting – the whole bus was filled with rolls of wool, and Mr. Löw-Beer was sitting among them. And when my mother arrived at the gatehouse, which was before the bridge, where there are barriers across the tracks in Chrastová, there is a bridge over the river and behind it was the gatehouse, and the Gestapo was already at the gatehouse looking for Löw-Beer. And my mother told them that she was going to Svitávka, that she had a bus full of wool and that she knew nothing about him. She spoke perfect German. They probably accepted her explanation, because she was allowed to leave. And so Mr Löw-Beer made it to Svitávka, but what happened to him after that, my mother didn't know."

"[Viliam] Šalgovič was the chief. He called us, we came to his office, he took a map and showed us which village we would go to, which village we would walk through, and what we would do in that village—that we would ask about the chairman of the national committee, the chairman of the cooperative. Various little jokes like that. And that we would walk through the village and contact a few people. And outside the village – and he showed us the spot where they would pick us up. You know, when you're locked inside the barracks, every bit of free time is like letting a bird out of its cage for a moment. We said to ourselves, well, why not? Let's go through with it. And I had a loaded pistol with me. Looking back, when the State Security agent came to pick me up at the quarry, he could have just shot me to prevent any witnesses, because we were actually acting as decoys. They needed to arrest people – farmers who didn't want to join the cooperative."