Ing. Karel Prokop

"You're leaving the person. You see them for, say, half an hour and you go away. Later on, the news would get out how things were going, not to mention that in Jáchymov, during the worst of times, there was downright famine. Those people were really in a terrible state. Adding to those difficult working conditions, there was borderline famine. It was only after the intervention of Soviet advisors, who saw how the prisoners would be devalued as a workforce, that things got a little bit better. But in the early 1950s, or before '56, the conditions were really drastic there. What saved my dad was that we sent him an accordion, which looked pretty nice, and he gave it to a Russian, this Soviet advisor who then got him a little better food rations. That's how he made it through the worst of the hunger."

"Then he was supposed to go to Dresden for a martial law trial, and of course he was facing the death penalty because my mother told me the investigation files contained the remark 'return undesirable'. His lawyer at the time claimed he had managed to erase the remark from the files. It's a question whether he actually did, but in any event, he wanted a hefty sum for that. Fortunately, Dresden was heavily bombed at that time, so the train taking my father to Dresden was also attacked and they went back to Terezín. There was a typhus epidemic in Terezín at the time, which affected the entire complex, so security was weakened and Dad managed to escape. He got to Prague where we had relatives. That's where he spent those final days of the war in 1945. Then he came home, also infected with typhus. He recovered, and by then the war was over. Better times began for us."

"I see my mother with my younger brother in her arms; he was a year old at the time. I see the bedroom flooded by light because the yard was full of Gestapo cars and spotlights that illuminated the mill. I learned they were supposedly looking for weapons and had actually come to arrest my father. They didn't find the guns because our friend had managed to take them out of the mill just before. They then told the Germans that he came fishing there, which was true, and that he hardly knew us, but of course, he was a long-time acquaintance. My father was arrested and taken to the Gestapo investigation villa in Klatovy and spent about a month or two months there. My mother brought him laundry and things like that. She walked because there were no trains at the time and our cars were seized at the beginning of the occupation. The distance from Borovy to Klatovy is about 17 kilometres, and she walked there and back."