Marie Šteflová

"Then all those soldiers were dumping all those weapons in front of our house. But when the war was on, they also had drills behind our house, where we lived. And they had drills there, and those poor ordinary soldiers would crawl around the fence and my mother would go and cut everybody a slice of bread. Daddy would say: 'What are you doing?! They'll shoot you for that!' But she gave it to them in some clever way, otherwise, the soldiers would be shot too. They weren't allowed to do that, they weren't allowed to take anything."

"My sister was learning to be a seamstress and my brother, he went to study, and we really saw how, when the war was almost over, the Germans kept walking around us. They used to go away and they used to go to Jindřichův Hradec, as they were headed west. My sister, when she was learning to be a seamstress, she would sit down and sew these tricolour pins and we'd pin it on our lapels like this and we'd go out on purpose on the road. My daddy came running for us and said, 'You geese!' And then they shot at us because they didn't want to see it, the tricolour."