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. Štěp…
In the evening of April 19, 1945, the settlement of Ploština was attacked by a special counter-partisan SS unit commanded by Werner Tutter. A Gestapo informer had managed to infiltrate the partisan group operating in this area and now, the Nazis came to punish the inhabitants of Ploština for h…
In the beginning of May 1945, Vilém Kantor, a member of partisan group Rodina, participated in the liberation fights in the village of Šebešťánová. The Germans fortified themselves in the local cemetery and they took some inhabitants of the village hostage: “They took women and children and some …
At the end of April 1945 little Božena witnessed houses being burned down in Prlov, where she was visiting her uncle along with her sister. The village was encircled by the Germans, and with the help of a captured sixteen-year-old partisan, Alois Oškera, they started to identify partisans and t…
When Mrs Kršáková was nine years old, her parents’ cottage and seven other houses in Vařákové paseky was burnt down by a unit of German soldiers. It was revenge for the death of one of the Germans killed by partisans who had been hiding at the cottage owners for the past two years. “They made us …
To help Slovak National Uprising, a lot of Czech patriots were crossing the borders in the area of the hamlet Stodoliska. Marie Kantorová, who was sixteen years and lived in the hamlet, helped some of them. She remembers one of those border crossings: “We were coming home and all the way through …
During the war, Miroslava Kaštovská and her family – her parents and two siblings, lived in the hamlet Znajka. In November 1944 a seriously wounded commander of the partisan brigade of Jan Žižka D. B. Murzin came to their house. Though they risked a lot when they let him go into their house, she …