How My Father Had to Feel

On April 20, 1945, nineteen tortured men were brought to the wood near the village of Kyjanice. In the evening, soldiers of the Wehrmacht ended their lives with a bullet to the back of head. Then they threw their bodies into a forest hut and set it on fire. Among the murdered men were Svatava Kubíková's father and only brother. “The hut was surrounded by one meter stacks of wood and they poured gas on it, threw the bodies in and set it on fire. All of them burnt there. How my father had to feel if he still perceived something! His son next to him. He on fire and no help. After the liberation we found out they were executed there. They dug them out and brought them home. All nineteen of them fit inside just one coffin. They buried them in Tršice. My brother was seventeen and my father was forty-three. Even today I hear my mother saying: ‛If only the boy stayed here with me,’” Svatava Kubíková recalled.