Jan Pils

"I remember that according to some laws we had to go to a German school. Mum, that was on September 6, 1943, according to the document - only in 1943. We went to the school in Domoradice to say goodbye. Then the teacher Velek said, 'Mrs. Pils, come on, we won't stand between the doors,' and he didn't let us into the classroom anymore. In the corridor he said to my mother, 'Mrs. Pilsová, it doesn't have to be forever.' And this is what I have already perceived. He said, it doesn't have to be forever. He meant Stalingrad and the events in Africa. There were also events against Germany. So with those words, 'Mrs. Pils, it's not forever,' we went to school in Rájov."

"We, as children, could get from the Protectorate to Krumlov very easily - we went under the barriers. At first there were two, one Protectorate barrier, the one by the Svatá Trojice inn. Then we ran to the German barrier, which was at the Cibulkas. We overcame that one too, and as children we could move around as we wanted. It was worse for the adults. They needed passports. These were difficult to obtain at first. Many Czechs from Domoradice worked in Krumlov, so the passports were easier to get. I lived in Krumlov with my grandmother in 1940, 1941. I wasn't obliged to go to school then, so the time in Krumlov was already influenced by Nazism. My grandmother and I no longer spoke Czech, but German."

"We arrived in Budějovice. I hated the train, so did my sister. And now they called us and put them in front of the table like this. My father said, 'Look, you stand in front of me and when I pinch you in the ass, you start crying.' I cried almost before. At first, the conversation was so normal calm - gracious lady, dear sir. And then it rumbled and my father pinched me. I don't know how they came up with such a clever trick. So I started crying, my father knew my sister would join. And it was not possible to continue persuasion. I have seven challenges at my disposal: Come to Budějovice on a certain day. Our parents were always able to influence it in some way that we went to Budějovice only once."

"I experienced the liberation very intensely. People were running along the Budějice-Krumlov road, an awful lot. And one fine day, somewhere in the distance, someone shouted, 'The Russians are coming!' And when it arrived, the Russians are coming, so I was with my grandparents. They lived on the left side of the road, we, Dad and Mom, and we lived on the right. Well, these already exhausted people already still managed to squeeze the best out of themselves. And those were scenes that are a bit imitated sometimes somewhere in a movie. It was dramatic. I remember a carriage, it was a military car pulled by horses and, a coachman. The horses were in a good shape and a prisoner wanted to hang on the car who had his leg in plaster. The coachman beat the horse and the poor man who wanted to hang himself. It was out of the question for me to get into the darkness across the road. So we agreed that I would sleep with my grandmother. A dramatic scene. The next day I woke up, the road was absolutely calm, no trace of any human being. But the sewers were full."

"I don't remember much about escaping from Krumlov, maybe I was three and a half years old. But I have an image in front of me where a group of people were sitting in an attic room and I could smell a strong arome. I would recognize the smell even now, the one of unwashed bodies. That was the only memory. I know what my mother and father said. The sad thing was that more Germans were fleeing from Nazism, from Hitler - they were afraid of him. They were of a different political belief. And when the Germans of a different thinking were fleeing from Krumlov, they sent them back to the Germans´ hands in Budějovice.”