Jaromír Procházka

"He was an intelligent - of course - and educated man. He even taught us the religion during the war, during the Protectorate. I remember that, when I was in like the second or third successive year of that common school at that time, at the end of - it was in the year, I don't know, 1943/1944, at the end of the school year. He says, 'I'm going to teach you a song that's from Fiddler's Tale, from the play, it's called Where's My Home.' It was a song from the play, and we learned it, and at the end of that year we sang, where he played the violin, like everybody does today, and he played Where's My Home, and we sang. It was at the end of the school year in the forty-third and forty-fourth, I remember that."

"I remember those [farm inspections during the Protectorate] very well, the soldiers and the Gestapo. There were always two Germans and maybe a Czech, or two Germans and one was a Sudeten, and the checks were strict. But our people were already so much like that that they were saying, 'Look, there was talk that there would be checks next week, but we don't know where.' So everyone was on alert. They came, but there were Germans among them, and Czechs, and they understood farming. They came, I don't know, with a German car, maybe a Mercedes, they stopped at the gate, the Gestapo got out, or... well, there weren't many Wehrmacht men. They were the cripples who came wounded from the front. No one was allowed out of the yard, no one was allowed in the yard, and the check started. They counted chickens, they counted pigs, they counted geese, they counted goats, they counted horses, cows, everything. Everything had to be written down. So, for example, there was a check on Monday and they didn't come for a month or two. Or maybe it was on a Monday and suddenly there was another check the next Monday."