Jindřich Prach

"And now I was walking up the stairs to the house, and now this Milda was flying down the stairs towards me. He was dressed up, he was wearing hiking boots, like he was going on a hike, and so on, and I said to him, 'Milda, hello, where are you going?’ He did not answer and he was gone. I just came upstairs and I heard some noise, next to them. And I came home and they told me to stay quiet as there were Gestapo men next door. So I listened to some shouting, screaming and what I remember at the time was Mrs. Perličková saying: 'Leave my children to me, leave my child to me! Why are you taking my child away from me?' And that was the only thing I remember from that, to this day. They're the kind of sensations or experiences that you remember all your life. Then I'll tell you one more, one more memory. Well, he flew up the stairs, he just ran away from them, and he must have had it figured out in time, because we had a corner house and one entrance was on one side and the other one was shared and you could run through it. So he ran through the yard and in the next house he hid in the woodshed, downstairs, in the cellar. Apparently he assumed, he thought, it was darkest under the candlestick. And it didn't work out. So they locked him up. They both came back, in that forty-fifth year. Milda came back, Mr. Petrlicka, I don't know when he came back. Milda suddenly appeared, he was all nicely dressed, nicely tanned, and he was wearing such parts of American equipment."

"March 15, 1939... well, I was six years old at the time... we didn't follow politics, as boys, we weren't that interested in it, well, not at our age either, of course. And our parents didn't talk about anything in front of us. Then it came to the point that the Germans came here, the German garrison, and that gave me such a strange impression. As boys, we liked those soldiers. It was driving, they had great music, fantastic music, and now they had these tanks and all this stuff, which we've never seen here in our lives, and they were quite decent. And I know that back then, in the Great Square, the Germans built field kitchens and they gave people there for free their national food, that eintopf. Which I tasted, and I absolutely hated it. That's desperate, that's terrible, there's everything from turnips to meat, in short, whatever you can find at home, you can get there. And so the people from Pisek came there with mess tins to get it, there was music playing and we quite liked that. It was a regular army and that was the young age. And I still remember one time I stopped in the arcade, there was a glass case and there were pictures from the movies in it. And I was staring at it, and it was up there, I couldn't see properly, and I was tiptoeing around looking at it like that, and all of a sudden I felt somebody grab me under the arm and pull me up like that. And he started mumbling something to me, I didn't understand, it was German, so I was looking at it and he put me on the ground and it was two guys in Wehrmacht uniforms and they were laughing terribly. And they asked me questions, but I looked stupid because I didn't know."