"I used to go there. The wooden pillar was placed in such a pile, and “tschetina” (coniferous branches) from the forest was placed on it. It had to be covered. And with the soot around, it was such coal dust, the whole pile had to be covered, to keep the air out. And it only had chimneys from which smoke was coming. If it had flown out, it would have burned out and nothing would have remained of it. "
"It killed my mom at two o'clock on Friday afternoon. She was going to us to bring us milk, at those mountains. And as she was walking from our cottage in the garden, shrapnel caught her there. And it killed mom and knocked over our unfinished wooden villa as well. It was already roofed, but not yet completely finished, and it collapsed like a box of matches. There were German troops artillery guns at the Kulišťáks and all over there, there was the German army artillery and they were firing, and that was what hit my mother. She had one leg completely ... [she] bled to death. "
"I saw four guys hanged at the school. We were at the butcher in the middle of the village buying meat. That was my aunt, my father's sister. We went out to the window in the hallway from which you could see the playground, which was about two hundred meters away. One of them came off and he had to climb upon it again. We stopped watching because it was impossible. I was a child. I was fifteen in 1944. "
Milada Linhartová was born on March 8, 1929 in Dolní Bečva as the elder one of two children to her parents Alois Blinka and Ludmila Blinková. During World War II, she witnessed several public executions of resistance movement members in Dolní Bečva. During the liberation of the village in May 1945, her mother Ludmila was killed by an artillery shell fragment. In 1949, Milada married Radko Linhart, who had joined the resistance movement during the war and supported the partisans in the area. After the communist regime onset, her father had to give up his trade, handing over the fields to the newly formed united agricultural cooperative. The husband lost the bakery, which he handed over to the Jednota cooperative. Milada Linhartová worked in bakeries and for twenty-two years in the LOANA knitting factory in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. In 2021, she still lived in her native village at the foothills of the Moravian-Silesian Beskydy. She died on February 10, 2023.
The day after the Linharts wedding; the house was newly built on the place of the witness´s birth house, which was burned down during the liberation of Bečva, July 3, 1949
The day after the Linharts wedding; the house was newly built on the place of the witness´s birth house, which was burned down during the liberation of Bečva, July 3, 1949
