Josef Holý

"And then, when the Russians arrived, individuals fled. They ran because the German troops were scattered, and they ran on their own. And mostly in the daytime they hid in the woods somewhere and in the evening, at night they would come to the village and look for food. Of course, they needed somewhere to eat. And they were mostly either Germans or Austrians, and they were running in that direction, trying to get to the Austrian border. And what they were trying to do was to avoid being captured by the Russians. That's what they were trying to do. Well, the outlying buildings of the village, so they came to those buildings at night, of course, and they hammered and demanded food from those people, to give them food. Weapons were delivered to the village, probably several rifles and one light machine gun. And here the local people had to keep watch around the village at night. And of course, there were also a few... that they hammered somewhere on the edge of the village, so there was some shooting. As I remember, one time they were also, and it was some larger group at their place, so they were here, like this hill, we call it Čihadlo, like towards Častrov. So there was some bigger group there. So here the militia tried to, they were attacking them here from the village. But it must have been some bigger group, because they were shooting back. And from the other side they were attacking them again from Perky. Here they appeared, here one man was manning the light machine gun, so he saw there, there was a balk, so he saw people under the balk, so he opened fire on them, here from the pond, this one behind the village. There was a pile of earth here, Zadražil had taken that pond out, like he has here by the house, so he took it out of that pond, and he took it out, and he had his meadow there, and he composted it there, that he would then, later on, spread it over the meadow as fertiliser. So he shot at them from the pile there and they started shouting, 'Don't shoot, we're from Perky!' They would have killed each other."

"Then, in the spring of 1945, it was sometime in the middle of March, German emigrants came here. Just whoever had horses and a horse cart, they had to go and get them and they brought them here from the station from Horní Cerekev. It was... it was mostly women with children and a few older men. It was about... about thirty people were brought here. It was around the middle of March, there was still snow in the ditches. And half of them settled at the school, in the classroom, and the other half were staying at the Doležals' pub. And we went to school here in a farmhouse, at the Zadražils'. There they had built one room in the yard. That was built for servants, for maids, and so we studied in that room. And when? They were here for about three weeks, a month at the most. And who took them away and in what way and why, I don't know. They just got lost and that was the end of it."