Bohumila Suchánková

"Then, when the communists started, they came again and urged dad to sign the JZD. They founded the JZD in Bánov - to sign the cooperative, because he understood cows and he went around helping with calving where it was difficult to calve a cow, in short, he liked the cattle. And he didn't sign that saying he wouldn't go there, to the cooperative, because the others had horses and a big farm and we had a few meters and we were already going to the cooperative? 'Then we'll liquidate you!' And we didn't believe it. And really, I think it was two or three times in the evening they were with us, coaxing my dad."

"The neighbours had a pit made, concreted for the winter, when they were transporting the beet cuttings from the sugar factory and some other mixture, they were stuffing it into the pit, tamping it and in the winter they were putting it into the cows' fodder, mixing it into something. They had horses and went to the mountains, to the woods to get wood, they took logs to the sawmill in Brod. When they were in the woods, they saw this poor man, starving, dirty, torn. They understood hi so-so that he was a Russian and had escaped from some concentration camp, not from the front. They took him home, put him among the logs, barricaded him somehow so he wouldn't be seen. When they drove through Bánov to Brod, he was lying among the logs. They brought him home and put him in the pit, put an old divan there, some clothes. He didn't go out at all, only after that, it was two or three months later, we saw a man chopping wood at their place. In short, he was doing some work, helping them. We, as kids, peeked over the fence. Their son-in-law was lived there, he had their daughter. He called my eldest sister and told her that he was a Russian, that they had taken him in the mountains, that he had escaped from the concentration camp hungry, dirty, not eaten, not dressed, and that they would hide him, but that no one must know, otherwise they would shoot Bánov out. So, of course, she didn't tell anyone, only us elders, and then he came to the fence and communicated with us. He was there, I think, for two or three years, they hid him. After the war, all the deserters were supposed to report to the military headquarters in Prague or wherever, and they went with him. The old one was called Zálešák, who used to be with them, the son-in-law was called Vystrčil and Uhérek, another of their family. All three of them went with him to the Russian consulate to testify that they hid him, that he escaped from the concentration camp, that they found him, nobody knows that they hid him. And they scolded him, the poor guy, the Russian birds, that he was hanging around in the woods, that there must have been an army somewhere nearby, that he should have gone to fight. They took him and brought him out into the courtyard and shot him behind the wall. He was such a skilful man, we mourned him too. They arrived completely shattered, the uncles, shattered from that Prague. They said: 'This is not how we imagined it.'"