Marie Blablová

"After the Germans brought the Russian women prisoners - Toňa, Žena, Aňa and Luba - they put them in the kitchen to work. We were forbidden to talk to them. Although we didn't understand them and neither did they understand us, we later learned how to communicate. Later, when we were scraping potatoes, they told us about the things they had seen during their transport from Russia. About the rivers of blood they had witnessed. Their mothers hid them in a dung heap, so they wouldn't find them. But they found all of them and took them to Kopřivnice, those four girls and four boys, and put them to work in Štraberk. They put them to a wall and we kids – curious as we were - climbed up on the tables and watched from the kitchen's window. They were standing there, face to the wall and we thought, oh my God, what is going on. It was the Russian girls and they put them on a room right next to ours. They blocked the door that connected the two rooms with a wardrobe on each side. We pushed it aside and got in touch with them. We were curious where they were from and what they did. One of them, Olga, studied for a doctor. She later left with the Russians. One of them went out for dates with Czech guys. They had to wear the 'Ost' marking on their clothes, so we passed her our clothes through the kitchen window and when she came back she changed her clothes again. These were experiences you can't even imagine.”

"Those boys from Štramberk were partisans, you know, they helped the Englishmen to hide and to leave the country. After the war only one came back, I don't know what happened to the others. We brought them food that we had stolen - I mean carried - from the kitchen. A loaf of bread, some flour and things like that. We never saw them - me and Soňa just left the food at a certain place and they took it. After the partisans helped the Englishmen to escape, the Gestapo drove around, shot and honked and searched building after building for the partisans but they never caught anybody. It was horrible. After the war it turned out that the Englishmen were in fact Scotsmen when they started to walk around Kopřivnice in kilts."

"Olga once told me: 'Žeňa is looking kind of fat, usually her skirt mops the floor and now it's around her knees. She's pregnant'. The German woman who was watching her found out about it as well. So the Gestapo arrived and took her away. But she never disclosed the name of the father. But the day before that Kelbl - a German and a member of SS - came with a bottle of wine, sausages and food. He said goodbye and told her not to tell them about him. We overheard their conversation through an open door. Later we found out, that he shot himself in a foundry sewer."