Ladislav Žížala

“We made our own cream and butter at home because we had a separator... well, and it was sealed during the war... there was a piece of wire stopped up with a seal, leading from the handle to the base, and you weren’t allowed to separate milk at home... but look now, it wasn’t any problem to get the wire loose.”

“[A portion of] everything had to be handed in. When you slaughtered a pig at home, you were required to hand in meat, lard, etc. You had to make deliveries of eggs. And the Germans kept... they were so orderly... they had these huge sheets. My dad was deputy mayor during the war... and because I was at grammar school until 39, I did the papers for Dad. You wrote everything there. How many pigs were born, how many heifers there were, how many cows, how many animals had died, with documents to prove the deaths... the Germans monitored that very closely. But even so, despite all that... there was need for meat... people would always breed a cow or heifer extra, and then you’d go to the butcher in Bystřice... over the hills from Skalice to Bystřice... and he’d process it for the black market.”

“They would come to check if the potatoes that had been reported, the harvest... so they simply measured the cellar, measured the height of the potatoes and estimated how many quintals [hundred-kilos - trans.] it was. And then they came to check if the amount dwindled at a rate appropriate to the cattle we fed them to. But that was done by Czechs, not by Germans... so we knew when another inspection was to be made.”