Anna Štichauerová

“Alfred Bartoš shot himself on this spot (the corner of Smilová and Sladkovského Street) while two Gestapo members were chasing him. He would rather shot himself than fall alive into their hands. My mother-in-law was just leaving the Jas cinema and saw a man who was accidentally shot – a random visitor of the cinema.”

“We stayed in a guesthouse called ‘By the Green Tree”. Our landlord had turned former stables into apartments during a reconstruction of the building. On June 24, 1942, a long convoy of trucks arrived at the guesthouse. The trucks were covered with sheets. The two Gestapo men who were friends of our landlord were at his place on that day. We went on the road to take a look at those trucks. It was really bad since we could hear women and children crying inside the trucks. I remember a lady who came out of the house on the opposite side of the road and when she heard the cries of the children, she went back inside the house and came out with a tray full of bread, milk and some salami and she wanted to give it to the children. Suddenly, a Gestapo man jumped out of one of the trucks and threatened her with his rifle butt. Eventually, he knocked the tray out of her hands and it fell on the ground. So after all, she wasn’t able to help the kids and women anyway. Her husband came running out the house because he was scared they might take her away together with the people from Ležáky. It was a shocking scene but nobody knew what had happened. Then a man came from Chrudim, riding a horse and shouting: ‘the village of Ležáky is burning’! It was pretty much clear to us what had happened to the village. In the evening, German troops surrounded the crematorium that was close to our place and started to carry the dead bodies from Ležáky inside. They began at 8 o’clock in the evening and continued all night long. No one was allowed to hide the ash from the burned corpses. The caretaker of the crematorium, Mr. Šafařík, nevertheless managed to hide some of the ashes. It´s on display either in ‘Zámeček’ or in the Ležáky village.”

“Martial law meant that no one was allowed to keep an unreported person at his place, the windows had to be blacked out and people weren’t allowed to be on the streets in the evening. Those who listened to the London broadcast and were caught were shot. The ones who approved the assassination of Heydrich were also shot, in the case where somebody gave them away. Every morning a list came out with names of people who had been shot the previous evening at the barracks. I was seven years old at that time and my parents did not want to talk about it in front of us. They were scared. I also overheard one of their conversations from which I learned that two men (for instance a man who also worked in the coffee substitute factory) were executed for having listened to the radio.”

“Not all the Germans were the same. After the Germans began to occupy the Sudetenland, they also began setting the Germans against the Czechs. I remember the story of one family from the Sudetenland who had to leave Šumava for good. Konrad Henlein had a speech at a Sudeten-German meeting in which he mentioned that all the poverty was to be blame on the Czech people. The father of that family raised his hand and said publicly that Czechs are badly stricken by poverty as well. He was subsequently labeled a traitor of Germany and a supporter of the Czechs. Somebody threw stones in their windows at night and they were threatened with physical harm. Thanks to their son, who served in the Wehrmacht, they got a temporary apartment across the street from us. We had only one room so I could hear everything that was said when they came to visit us. Their son, a German soldier, came to visit them quite often. Then they got an apartment opposite the ‘Zámeček’ so they could hear every shot of the executions. The mother collapsed and even moving to the center of Pardubice didn’t help.”