“There was an army exercise in our village. I was at home alone. My mom was in the shop in the village and dad worked in the field. I was simply alone at home and there was a German soldier behind the window and he was gesticulating something to me. I was scared and I hid under the table and I waited for my mom to come back from the village. When my mom came, the soldiers knocked on the door again, and one of them spoke Czech and they wanted me to sweep out the soot from the stove and give it to them. He pointed to my face and I did not understand what the soldier wanted from me. My mom cleaned the soot from the stove and they used it to mask their faces and the army exercise was held there. We had only three rooms and the staff came and they asked us to allow them to stay in one of those rooms for a day or two (I don’t remember precisely). We grudgingly vacated the rooms for them but I can say that they thanked us, they were polite and nothing got lost. Later with the Russians it was worse.”
“Deportees then started coming. It was already before the end of the war, around February 1945. There were tens of thousands of them every day, and they had horses and wagons covered with tarp. There were women and children. It was horrible. From the human point of view, we felt sorry for them. We had people from Líbeznice behind our house and they stared at them as if they were in a theatre. They stared at the suffering of those people. There were many of them who passed through the village and they knocked on our door many times and they wanted us to give them some coffee and one day a German woman changed her child’s diapers in our house. Well, our people did not refuse. But as for the coffee, you cannot give coffee to ten thousand people. There was a coffeepot on the stove and we brewed coffee and then again and mom gave the coffee to several people. And there was a guard – a German policeman (he was a Kraut), and he knew Czech. And one German woman told him that my mom had refused to give her water. My mom said that she was not able to speak German, but that the woman had not asked for water, and that the word for coffee was the same in Czech and German and that she did not have any coffee left now and therefore she was not able to give her any coffee.’ No, she asked you for water and you did not want to give it to her. We will deal with you.’ And the policemen from Líbeznice later told us that it had taken them a great deal of effort to talk him out of it and to prevent him from sending my mom to prison, and that happened in February before the end of the war.”
“People started talking politics and the meetings of the Unified Association of Czech Farmers were held. Minister Ďuriš was the chairman of agriculture at that time and people used to say that he had formerly been a dance teacher. And that the police had chased him in Lucerna because he had not paid taxes. So you can imagine what it probably looked like. They said that farmers who had less than 13 hectares would not have to join the cooperatives. People trusted them just like they had at the time of the currency reform and the same thing happened with the farms. The large farms were confiscated based on Act 55, and in many cases, people were evicted from their farms. And what was the worst, they did not give them even a meager retirement allowance. Many young people had their obligations to take care of their parents and nobody gave them anything.”
Věra Sýkorová, née Papryčová, was born on August 31, 1932 in Líbeznice near Prague into a family of farmer Čeněk Papryč. She attended elementary school in her native village and after study at the People’s Agricultural School in Prague-Vinohrady in 1946-1949 she worked on her father’s farm. During the Second World War she witnessed several war-related incidents in Líbeznice and its environs. German officers established their staff in the Papryč family’s house during an army exercise. In 1948 she participated in the last All-Sokol Rally in Prague. From 1950 onwards Věra witnessed the persecution of her father perpetrated by the authorities which were controlled by the Communist Party. After her wedding in 1951 she was affected by the persecution of the Sýkora’s farm in Bašť, into which she married and where she worked until 1958. In 1961, forced by the circumstances, she joined the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) where she then worked until her retirement in 1988. At present she lives in the village Bašť on the former farm of the Sýkora family together with her family. Věra Sýkorová died in 2019.
