Ludmila Sochorová

"Because my dad spoke Russian well, there was a staff at our house. There were high-ranking officers there, they slept at our house, we had to leave our sleeping quarters at home and they settled in our house, so you know I remember that. I can still remember the one guy washing himself halfway in the kitchen, taking his watch off and putting it on the kitchen table. Mother made him dinner, he ate, he looked, where's his watch? The watch was gone, and some of the crumpet they had, their servants, I guess that's who... because that was the main thing - give me times! They had a lot of 'times' on their hands."

"In Bohdalov they [the partisans] were... As they were draining the distillery before the Russians came, so they couldn't get drunk, they were draining distilleries everywhere. And so in Bohdalov, when people knew that, they were already saying, 'They've already drained over there, over there...' I remember that. They were discharging everywhere, that was already known in Bohdalov, where there was also a distillery, and so people were already patrolling at night. There was a service, when it would flow. And now actually one night someone was banging on our window: 'Wake up, it's leaking, wake up!' So everybody grabbed buckets, jugs, whoever had what, and ran to the distillery to get alcohol. I remember it as if it were today."

"No, he didn't get in [to the legions], because they first put him in some foundries in Moscow. There he would have lost his life, how terrible it was. So then they put him in the country with some men and he rode with oxen. He said, 'I felt at home, a lark over my head, riding with the oxen. They were good to me, those men, I had enough food.' But listen, they all ate from a common bowl. If it was a Sunday, for example, everybody - just the sons and that - everybody was together in one house, a bunch of people, the kids, everybody. And there was an elder of the family and the granny, her name was Agafia. She was cooking on an open fire, and she was pushing casseroles around. Daddy said when she was making some porridge, sometimes there was a complete blackness of those... what are they called... not cockroaches, that's what they're called in Russia..." - "That's the Russians, isn't it?" - "Yes, like cockroaches. So the granny drove them out of the casserole and served the food. On Sunday they had meat. She killed a chicken, cooked it in soup, everyone ate from a common bowl, and only when the old man knocked on the bowl with his spoon did the fight over the meat begin. He said, 'Whoever did not hurry did not eat.'"