Anna Vašátková

"Before all of this was over, the war was being taken for granted. There were some soldiers staying on the field above our farm. They dug a hole in the ground and lived there. I don't remember how many there were anymore. They got bored and came to our house. They wanted some fried eggs or something to eat. But then, after they ate, they didn't want to go back to their hole so they stayed at our place. We would play some board games with them. Back then, we only had an oil lamp burning in the room and the light it was giving was very poor. You couldn't tell the green pieces from the blue ones. They would tie a ribbon to the pieces in order to distinguish them from each other on the board."

"A Russian came to my dad and asked him for his watch. Someone told us that the Russians were after watches so my dad hid it in a closet where my mom kept a box of remnants… My dad had to take the watch out of his closet and give it to a Russian as he threatened him with a gun. He wanted that watch really bad. My mom had a watch as well. It was a small watch on a tiny chain from the old days. She would tie the watch to her snack basket so she would know what the time was when she was far in the back. She left that watch lying freely in the cupboard. The Russian knew very well where to look for it. He found it and it was gone as well. A story was being told in Králíky that one Russian took an alarm clock that was set and when it went off he shot it to pieces with his machine gun."

"The Russians drove huge herds of livestock with them. They wanted to take the cattle to Russia. Sometimes I'm wondering if that livestock has ever made it to Russia. The cows had to be milked by somebody but the women were afraid of the Russians so the cows were hardly ever milked. This is how they spread the foot-and-mouth disease in the countryside. They introduced it to Červený Potok as well. We didn't have it at our farmstead but some of our neighbor's livestock became infected. In order to stop the spread of it, it was forbidden to seize the German farms that were affected. Because of this, the Czechs living in the surrounding villages who wanted to seize the farms of the Germans who had been expelled were prevented from doing so. Then, when the foot-and-mouth disease was over, the Slovaks came and seized the remaining farms as the Czechs had already taken the other property and were no longer interested. So this is why the farms in Červený Potok were mostly taken by Slovaks. It was because of the foot-and-mouth disease."

"There was a sort of a Marian column on our lands. It was because they had buried the victims of the plague there and then they built the column on top of the grave. When my parents bought the farm, there was a provision in the contract saying that the column had to be well maintained and kept on the estate. Therefore my parents would care about it. My mom put a wreath on it on All Souls' Day. The people who took our estate didn't care a bit about it though. They weren't attached to the column at all. They didn't know why it stood there and what it was good for. They didn't believe in God. They built some storehouses on the land and the column was removed. It simply disappeared one day."