Emílie Rezková

"I think back to when they were going around searching all over the house, driving around with radar. That's when the two Tatraplans always came and they were already driving around the garden. And that was all the time. And Daddy once also, I said it to the kids... once also, 'Where's your gold, Mr. Kvoch?' Daddy pointed to the cesspit and said, 'Here's my gold.' They searched it all through. There was nothing there, no gold. 'There's no gold here.' Daddy said: 'That's my gold, I fertilize the garden with it.' So they took him away, he was arrested here in Bartolomejska. We have this clock, Hönes, it's called a cuckoo clock, a huge old clock, and it had whistles inside. And there was a little figure, we used to love it as kids, the little man always peeped out when it was at the top of the hour. And they used to drive around with this radar, and now it started beeping or I don't know what, they ripped the whistles out, thinking, well, it might be made of gold. Well, it wasn't, was it. Or they must've been driving around like that every three months. And when they did, Daddy... somebody advised him to buy an Alsatian that they wouldn't dare go into the garden like that, and they opened the gate and they came in. So the Alsatian, I don't know where he got it. We just had the Alsatian, Ashant. Well, Ashant was a year old, they came with a Tatraplan, the soldiers came with a GAZ vehicle, they took Ashant away from us. They're so... I'd forgotten all about that. We Skype with that brother from Sweden every Friday. It's like ours meeting, at seven o'clock on Fridays, we're on our own. We talk about what we've been doing all week and stuff. And my brother was like, 'Do you remember the name of the dog we had that was taken away from us?' I couldn't remember at all, and then I was like, 'That was Ashant!' He was black, beautiful. So I don't know what they did with him. If the soldiers really took him to the border, they said he was going to the border, or if they shot him somewhere in the woods in Hradišťko. You don't know. These were such unreal things."

"I was born in 1948, in December, and my father had half of his lungs taken away in 1949, he had lung cancer. So from then on he was really ill, it was quite serious and he lived until 1960. And he always said when they were taking it all away, he didn't believe it at all. Everybody, the goldsmiths would tell him, 'Stash away some gold, take it abroad,' and my dad used to say, 'Why would I do that? I'm supporting the state with my work here,' and that's how he ended up. They evicted... when they confiscated it, Daddy said the only thing he took from the shop was a hat and a cane, that's all he took. They wanted to evict them to the Šluknov region, but somehow they talked it out and went to Pikovice, to the house they had built in 1939."