Věra Kopejsková

"My uncle from Unhošť was the greatest farmer, he married my father's cousin. I remembered him when we went to his farm after the war and he showed me his horses - and that he had just had a foal. He said, 'Come and see my foal.' That was about 1946. And then collectivisation came. But because he was the biggest landowner, they evicted him. He begged them, 'Take everything, take everything, just leave me the horse.' No, he had to take the horse to the execution. They moved them to Horoměřice and they lived there in a kind of a shack, almost like a bus stop waiting room. That's where he lived. Well, I didn't see my uncle for a long time. And then, when I started working as a nurse at the Military Hospital, I suddenly said in the operating theatre: 'Jesus, uncle, hello, you're here.' And he said: 'I'm working in a brickworks now as a builder and it's good.' So I said to him, "Say hello to my aunt." Then came the year sixty-eight, and those same communists remembered that they had stolen the Šimáček family farm. Because in the meantime the farm, there was a cooperative farm, so that they would give it back to them. So in 1968 they returned the farm. My aunt and uncle came back, the farmhouse was ransacked, empty, only her stove was still there. She said, 'I sat by that stove and I cried, I cried. My uncle said he would look around the farm. He went to look around the farm, but he didn't go home for a long time. My aunt went looking for him and found him. He had hanged himself in the barn."

"Suddenly we heard the stumping of the SS men, they had their boots on, so it was so audible. And they left us out, fortunately, but they went into the farmhouse next door, so that terrible wailing, screaming, I heard that for a long time as a child. And people from the next village went to help our people, but the SS shot them with a machine gun from the castle, from the turret. And Strejc, Mr. Strejc, the engineer, and another one, who wore a uniform, Czechoslovak uniform, and with a white flag, went to negotiate with them, so without mercy they put them there in an alley and shot them. So there were about eleven people who got killed unnecessarily."