Karel Straka

“There were either refugees who were running from the approaching front, or German soldiers. The great hall was where they were accommodated. The kitchen was in the garden. When the Germans were there, we weren’t allowed to go into the kitchen. They let us taste their ‘eintopf’. In the field kitchen they had big cauldrons into which they threw everything possible, vegetables, meat, and they called that eintopf. Then the German soldiers left, and after a while, when the front moved on into Russia, there came Russian captives, who had to walk all that impossible distance from Russia. And they didn’t even have shoes, that just wasn’t a thing. They had their feet wrapped up in rags. It was winter. If you had seen the suffering. The floor of the great hall was strewn with straw, and they slept on that straw. So they were there, it was winter and it was freezing. It varied. The captives left, and a band of refugees arrived.”

“I don’t know how they found that option, but somewhere or other they managed to obtain a piece of wood, and they carved wooden pistols out of it. Completely primitive ones, but that was something for the boys to see. When the guard wasn’t looking, or when he moved off somewhere, mainly the children went to have a look there. And through the fence he gave a pistol for a chunk of bread. I remember that some of them even had a rubber band, that you could shoot with it as if. They helped themselves out like that, so they wouldn’t die of hunger, it was awful.”