Ing. Jitka Pešová

“They were still trying to learn something. It was the kind of old teachers who presumed their Latin mattered the most in the whole world. Our language of instruction was German. We were forbidden to teach Czech literature. We had no textbooks, everything was written. We did not have geography, we kept memorizing stuff about the German Empire, and then we also calculated star distances, until now I know nothing about it. That's how it was. The German Nazi inspector also came to visit us and we all had to hail. One of my classmates, František, was left-handed, so he greeted with his left hand and it was a great offense. He was called to the director's office, where he had to apologize and had to explain that he was left-handed, that he was wrong.”

“The commander of the hospital, a Nazi, declared that all the town representatives, important inhabitants of Bystřice, must be taken away. To the middle school class, the hospital. That he gave them a condition: if they heard a single shot, that someone would be shot by partisans, so that the captives would be very strictly treated. Well, out neighbor Stanislav Vrbík, who was in illegal activity, sent out, at least he came to tell us, an advice among all guerrilla groups not to shoot and save the detainees in the school.”

“The Neděles did not return from Mauthausen. I would like to say that it was just after the grain harvest event that my father received a card from Mauthausen to remove the so-called repair keys from the threshing drum, because if he did not remove them, everything would be revealed in the rumble. So the father went, took the guns from the threshing drum and went to dig them into the forest and succeeded. He marked the tree with a notch so he could pick up his weapons after the war, of course he couldn't find the weapons after the war. The forest became a clearing, because people were looking for heating during the war. There was nothing else to burn, so they cut down the trees.”