Věra Zachařová

"I could have been, I don't know, five or six years old, so that I wouldn't be afraid, he taught me courage so that when we lived in Kostelec there was a flat roof over the bathroom and laundry room. At the height of the first floor. I had to jump off that roof into his arms, into the yard, which was concrete, there were big concrete squares. And on those squares, on that concrete, I had to jump into his arms. I mean, I jumped calmly because I wasn't afraid of him. But when I think about it today, I get chills. We just weren't allowed to cry. He was awfully nice, but if I cried about something, like hurting me or something, he would have a tantrum. You weren't allowed to cry in front of him, he just taught us what he had in him."

"They arrested a lot of Sokol members, even from Kostelec, but mainly from Prague. And those families were... they just didn't have any source of food. So they [the Sokols] wanted to support them with food, right, but back then they were quota slaughters, it was just all quota and on tickets. I even remember as a child I was still sticking tickets in those squares, I was still sticking our tickets in those sheets after the war, it was still going on after the war. So that the Germans would have control. Well, but just by the fact that it was controlled like that, he would slaughter it at night and carry it... just somehow they would export it so that it wouldn't roll. Which maybe it wouldn't have if the other butcher in Kostelec hadn't killed him."

“As far as I remember what my daddy said I was taken to re-education to Germany, as I fulfilled the Arian norms. Such children were sent to German families without any own children. I was already in the transport, but thanks to my parents´ friends I disappeared from there. So that they didn’t find me, I was sent far away to my granny in Činěves, where no one looked for me.”

“He had a concrete kind of… cell there. There were tires thrown on top of it. He was hiding inside all day long and went out only at night to stretch out. Gestapo men with dogs obviously searched him but lost his track at the river. It an enormous courage on their part (the Chalupa family – editor´s note) unbelievable courage. They had two boys of their own and they´d execute the whole family. Of course they knew he got a death penalty.”

“His (father – editor´s note) was released in the first wave of arresting of Sokol members and then they imprisoned him again for denouncement. My parents learnt after war, who denounced them; it was the other butcher in Kostelec. He found out that my father was slaughtering cattle at night as everything was to get with ratios and he supported the Sokol member families. He did that at night. The other butcher saw the light under the door and denounced him. So that is how they took my father. When the gestapo took him he got sentenced to death penalty. He was sent to work in ruin and as a loading car went past, he caught it from below and let it drive him out of the prison.”