Anežka Vavrousová

"Then, when they [the Gestapo] left, my mother had already seen my father driving the cart up the hill, and now, when he arrived in the yard, she said: 'Teodor, the Gestapo was here. It was here for you this morning and now again.' 'And what do they still want me to do? I haven't done anything.' I don't know. There were two of them.' He started to get ready for church because he always went to church at seven-thirty. It was a Polish [mass]. He would always go to the Polish one and my mum would prepare lunch. 'And before you even go to church, I'm going to go and get milk through the woods.' Well, yeah, only she was stopped there by the army and asked where she was going. So she's going to her parents to get milk. 'You can go there, but you can't go back.' And now she passes a neighbour called Mr Folwarczny and he says, 'Warcop, what are you doing here? Half of Životice is shot up, what are you doing here?' Only then did my mother realize why they kept coming to his house."

"The policeman here who had the Great Dane, that was Sattler. He used to walk the dog. When we saw Sattler walking with the dog, we ran. We had a wooden fence and there was a hole in it and we looked through the hole to see if he was coming towards us or not, and as he was approaching we ran towards the woods. We were scared, not so much of Sattler, because we had no idea what kind of person he was, but we were terribly scared of the dog. Then he came and Mummy was just to give birth to my sister. She was lying there in bed and he came and ripped everything out from under her. 'What are you looking for? I'm about to give birth.' The midwife was walking in the yard and he threw it all out and came in with the dog. He was in the bedroom. He's gone through everything. So we were scared of this man, what was going to happen. And he always came when Daddy was out. I remember him stumping around in his boots."