Eliška Michalská

“A man came there; he was a bit short. He spoke perfect Czech. Dad had returned from the forest at about six in the morning. He was sleeping just in his underwear and shirt. He had only taken off his trousers and he went to bed. This Gestapo man came in, he threw away dad’s blanket and commented: ‘Obviously, he didn’t even have time to undress properly.’ Dad was completely shocked because he was just woken from his sleep. Dad reached for something on the bedside table and the Gestapo man brutally hit him with his gun over his hand. This made me angry and I yelled at the Gestapo man that Dad was a human being just like anybody else, and what did he think he was doing? I was so audacious that I even told him that what he did might come back to him. Mum rushed over to me and she held her hand over my mouth to make me quiet and not make the situation even worse. But it made me so mad that this man was beating Dad, and so I didn’t care what I said. The guy looked at me in disbelief, but nothing else happened. However, they allegedly treated Dad terribly because of that. They escorted him to Horní Bečva in the Moravian Walachia region, and one independent trader who lived there later told me what had happened. He told me about how they had brought them in there and what they had done to them there. I only learnt about it when I was older. It had to be terrible.”

“In order to be able to support the partisans… Dad had a good friend and we were going for walks with his children. We had backpacks with bread and things like that. We would leave the things in the gamekeeper’s lodge and Dad would then stuff our backpacks with something else so that it would not look suspicious. We were carrying food to the lodge, but we didn’t know about it. I realized it only later when I grew older. I thought that something was happening.”