Marie Raisiglová

"They came early in the morning, and as they were ringing the bell, my parents heard it and knew it was the Gestapo, so they didn't want to get up and go open the door for them. Only I also woke up as they were ringing terribly, so I just woke my parents up, but they were already awake. I said, 'Someone's ringing!' So my parents got up and went to answer the door. So they came in there and they took Dad and they took all the fabric that we had in that flag and they took our radio. Then they came to get mummy later."

"One evening he came home and said he had met an acquaintance who was rumored to had been picked up by the Gestapo. He met him suddenly in the street. They were talking and made an appointment. But [Václav Morávek] was afraid it was some kind of betrayal. The Gestapo apparently let him go to bring Moravek in. And so he and my dad were there discussing how to do it. They had the meeting on the Powder Bridge. And Daddy finally said to him, 'Look, you always got away with everything, you'll get away with it here.' Morávek never had our keys, but this time Daddy forced them on him and said that if he was running away from the Gestapo, so that he wouldn't have to ring the bell and wait for us to open the door, but so that he could open the door himself, he finally forced the keys on him. And he, Moravek, said, 'Okay, but if I see that it's bad, I'll throw them away.' And he really threw them away. But not only were the SS there, but our police officers were there. And this one officer heard that something clicked, that Morávek had thrown something away, and he walked around for so long that he found our keys. So he brought them to the station, and the next day my father came to work and saw our keys hanging there. He said, 'What's this here?' And they said they'd go around and ask if anybody had lost or needed their keys. My dad pretended to be ill and stayed at home because he knew that it was the end."

"He [Václav Morávek] mostly sat in the kitchen during the day. He could rhyme. He just reeled off poems that he made up. I got a puppet theater for Christmas that year, and he wrote plays in verse for the puppets. He looked at my puppets and wrote plays for them. But then my mother flushed it all away when the Gestapo arrested my father, she flushed all these things down the toilet. Because Václav Morávek said: 'If the Gestapo come, they know my handwriting'. We knew that he had something to do with the Gestapo, but under the name of Mr. Malý. And he said, 'Destroy it immediately.' So then my mother destroyed it all."