Marie Kubová

"It was around noon and suddenly a car, more like a bus, stopped in front of the school. The Germans rolled out of it wearing heavy boots and stomped to the school and up the stairs. I can still hear them screaming. We weren't allowed to walk out, the headmaster had to stay in his office and teachers where they were just teaching. They kept yelling at us not to come out of the classrooms. The teachers didn't know anything, we were all scared. We were locked up like that for about two hours. After two hours, we saw our schoolmates from the sixth grade, aged fifteen or sixteen, only boys from the window. The seventh graders went including the girls, and nobody saw them ever again."

"We hid prisoners during the war. I'll tell you that too, it's interesting. We used to have a big stack of straw out there behind the barn. One night we were sitting after dinner and suddenly there was a knock on the window. The windows were covered with blankets, no light was allowed. There were huge fines for failing to blackout. We were all scared but we opened it. It was an escaped convict from Terezín. He was hungry and needed a place to sleep. We hid him. He recovered a little and left. We hid about 12 of them during the war. We put them in a straw stack; it was huge. A tunnel was made from the top all the way down. They climbed up and slid all the way down so they weren't visible. We'd bring them food and they'd recover. They were Russian soldiers who had escaped from captivity, one was a Frenchman. We prayed that the Gestapo wouldn't find out."