Věra Benešová

"Well, there was their infirmary business, so they needed to move the wounded somewhere. So they actually broke through the walls and they were interconnecting the houses here, here in the chemist´s towards the end of the passage. The neighbours came across it, that it wasn't well walled up, because my parents were bricking it up in a hurry after the war, so it wasn't professionally done. So that's why they had a post office three houses down. And in the meantime it was used for their sanitary purposes. Well, because it was like an infirmary, they couldn't finish very soon, so they stuck here for six weeks. Well, we were in the basement with them. Which made them very angry, because they thought we had some treasures or something that they could use. And so one day after the six weeks they came and said we had to move out in twelve hours. That's when Daddy arranged it for the whole day and into the evening. Luckily, a friend of my aunt's beloved had such a poor horse. Well, we carried stuff up the whole garden, which is twenty-five steps, and she took it to my grandmother's house on Hřbitovní [Street]."

"In the forty-fourth year, actually it was still 1943, we took the entrance exams to the municipal school and we were accepted there, we were four Czech children. Two girls and two boys. We studied well, we got A's, B's mostly. It was all good. But then they invited us to Znojmo for supposedly psychotechnical exams, but they needed to camouflage it somehow. Our parents were in the next room. They were persuading them to join the Germans. Since none of our four parents agreed, just after Easter we got a letter saying that we had failed. Which wasn't true at all. So we had to go to the fifth grade, it was a single class then, and since then all my friends have kind of drifted away from me. We were something else, so we didn't really talk much. And they just didn't notice us, which didn't bother us after that, because after a while it was liberation."