Milada Jelínková

“That was in 1945, the SS were running away and the Germans were running away, because we lived in Zborov, which is quite close to Nové Hrady and there's a passage to Austria, so the Germans were running that way. I remember that, I asked my mum about that, about twelve SS members came and I remember that they had these black pouches here. My mum said they were grenades or something. And they wanted to drink some water so we had to go to the well, because the well was outside in the garden, there were no water pipes. So all of us, three children and our mum had to have a sip and only then they would drink the water.”

“It was a younger woman with two small kids, the child was really tiny, about two or three years old, an older child, and one old lady so that was one family. Our parents took them in, because we only had a cottage and just two or three rooms, so my mum and dad took them home. I don!t remember what followed since we had to go to bed I think so that we wouldn't see everything. And we woke up in the morning because there was a field and a garden next to us, and Russians were there. And those people were devastated, the Germans, they were terribly scared, so, we had coal, a shed to store coal that had some space, so they went to hide behind the coal and my dad created a sort of a barricade so they were hidden among the coal and there was a dog, a mean wolfdog. And, well the Russians went inside the house and everything belonged to them. But then what happened was that my father took those Germans and drove them to the train station in České Budějovice.”