Zdenka Nováková

"I received a notice from Chrudim saying that I had to come for a personnel interview. I thought it was because I was transferring to a different school. I took the train from Litomyšl, and at Tržek, a classmate got on and said, ‘So they kicked you out too!’ I said, ‘No, they didn’t. I’m going to school in Poděbrady.’ There was a committee meeting there — men from Transporta and one teacher who used to teach us and whom we always made fun of. He had a notebook; the boys once stole it, and in it, he had written down the number of hectares for each student. He taught civic education, and if someone’s family had too many hectares, they couldn’t get the best grade. When I walked into the committee room — there were more than twenty of us from the school, we were three classes, so almost a whole class — they only asked me how many hectares we had, nothing else. They weren’t interested in my school report at all, and I had good grades, but nobody wanted to see it. They asked me how many hectares we had, and I knew we had thirteen hectares of arable land, so I said thirteen. They told me that wasn’t true, that we had over sixteen — including meadows, a bit of forest, everything together — and that I couldn’t continue studying at the school."

"He served there, he rode horses and he was German. There were many Czech-German or German-Czech villages near Litomyšl. He was a German from the village. I was small, he played with me, he was good, everything was good. When it was getting close to the war, he used to ride his bicycle in the evening to the village he came from. They had meetings there. He changed completely — he became arrogant, would always return home late at night on his bicycle, and didn’t want to get up in the morning. The horses had to be fed. One time, my father scolded him at the ‘záhrobni’ (evening meeting after work), telling him that it couldn’t go on like this, that he couldn’t just sleep as long as he wanted. My grandmother’s sister, an old woman in a headscarf, happened to be there and dared to say something about Hitler — probably something mocking. He lunged at her and grabbed her by the jacket. I was nearby and thought he was going to throw her into the manure. My father pulled them apart, he got angry, and left us because he had been conscripted."