“My dad was drafted; actually he was not drafted, because Czechs volunteered to join the army. They wanted to defend their country. When he was in the army, my mom lived with the grandpa and grandma Kubík and Bandera’s bands began raiding there in the area. If somebody killed a member of Bandera’s gang, for example, they would take revenge. They killed him in the lower part of the village, and they carried him to the graveyard up on the hill. When his funeral was to be held, we ran to hide in the rye field on the hill and we watched it. As they were walking towards the graveyard, they were setting all houses along the way on fire. Those people who lived above the cemetery were lucky. Those who lived along the way had their houses burnt. I only remember that when we returned down to the village, a couple of days later we went to some aunt’s house for something. We opened the door and we saw an arm hanging down from a ladder and blood trickling down. I only have ugly memories like those from that time.”
“Some time passed. We had to move out (from Michalovka), because somebody said something and mom found a note under the door that if we had not moved out, then… Auntie who had returned from the concentration camp was already living there with us at that time, and so there were three women, me, and Mirka. They readied the horses and they loaded whatever they could. But what could one carry? Almost nothing. My mom was baking bread, she had just prepared the dough. The clothes were washed and waiting to be hung and dried in the morning. Everything was left as it was and we only kept what we had put on, and we ran to Rovno. It was not possible for us to stay there, and eventually we thus stayed in Kvasilov a little further away. We arrived there without anything; we had nothing. One family, Mr. and Mrs. Jelínek, lived there, and they provided a small room for us, about the size of a goat sty. The five of us were surviving there. Without food or anything else. In order to have something to eat, my mom and my older aunt were going to the dumpsite and gathering potato peels and things like that so that we would have something to eat. Everything turned out well, because some woman then gave her a goat and later we bought a little pig. We spent one year in Kvasilov living in this way. When life became better, an order – or rather an offer – came that families could follow their husbands and move to Czechoslovakia. We thus packed everything and loaded it onto train cars. From the journey here I only remember that the door from the cattle car opened and we sat in the open door, swinging our legs and singing Czech songs. I don’t remember anything more.”
Zdena Machková, née Kubíková, was born January 4, 1941 as the only child of Marie (née Schreiberová) and Dobroslav Kubík in Michalovka in Volhynia. The family belonged to descendants of Czech exiles who had left the country after the Battle of White Mountain. Shortly after the liberation of Volhynia by the Red Army Zdena’s father joined the 1st Czechoslovak Army corps and Zdena and her mother spent several years living in destabilized Volhynia. In 1947 they were repatriated to Czechoslovakia where they went to rejoin their father and husband, but Mr. Dobroslav Kubík had meanwhile started a new family. Zdena and her mother therefore lived for one year in Stadice and then they moved to the area in the foothills of the Ore Mountains, where Zdena attended elementary school and where she found her first job in 1955 in Krajka Kraslice. In 1958 she married Dalibor Machek, she gave birth to their four daughters and they settled in Horní Rotava. From mid-1960s she worked in the warehouse of the Rotava branch of the Škoda factory. She considers the region of the Ore Mountains to be her home.
