Out of the Window

On November 16, 1944 K. H. Frank announced the extensive anti-partisan action codenamed "Grouse." Around the village Lhotská Louka, where Štěpánka Kaliková lived, the Nazi administration declared the martial law and deployed thirteen thousand German soldiers who hermetically sealed the area. Štěpánká Kaliková remembers that when she was on her way home from Horní Bečva the German soldiers started to check the house of her neighbours Tkáčovi. “The Germans went through the wood so nobody saw them,” our witness remembers. Then she watched the whole scene out of the window. Her neighbours were hiding about eighteen partisans so the encounter ended in gunfire. “The partisans were drying their boots downstairs on the oven. They grabbed it and ran to the forest. It was quite cold, a lot of snow. All of them did not get out and the Germans shot three partisans and wounded one of them. They tied the wounded one to their vehicle and pulled him by the car. He had to be dead in minutes. The rest of the partisans got away.” Five partisans and six German soldiers died where the gunfire took place. The Germans set the house on fire and arrested Kamila Tkáčová and her two sons. Kamila Tkáčová did not survive the brutal interrogations and torture and committed suicide in the prison in Frenštát pod Radhoštěm.