Jiřina Borecká

“And unfortunately there were so many diseases back then, so many children died there... I was as thin as a rake and didn’t catch anything. But my mother got typhus. So I remained there alone with that little boy. Nobody cared about me. I was ten years old. And he wetted his bed in the night. Then there was a woman who also had a little child and she always beat him up. And I was really worried about that. She beat him because he wetted his bed in the night. Of course he didn’t wake me up, I was only ten. And so it happened that already as a child I had various thoughts. And as if my sister realised what was going on, she saw me standing on the balcony. And she came to me and said: ‘There there, Mum’s already getting better. She’s out of the worst of it.’ And she really did come back. She recovered. But she always gesticulated at me like: ‘Go there, we’ll meet there...’ She meant I should go there with the little boy. And he got it from her, the typhus. He got the whooping cough and died soon after. And the woman who beat him, she was younger and had to work. And my mother cared for her boy. And suddenly he got the whooping cough, the boy did, and me and her took him to hospital in the tram. And he... we didn’t even get there and he was dead.”

“I remember that... if you don’t mind hearing about the first moment when it came without the siren. They didn’t warn us there would be an air strike. My dad was here for a short vacation and so he wanted to be with my mum alone. So mummy asked a neighbour to take me and the little one out. I had a little brother, he was less than two years old. So she took me quickly to the pram and we went to Radlas Street for a walk. And suddenly – back then there were trains going there, nothing goes there any more, but back then there were trains. And suddenly we saw, no sirens - that somebody was shooting at us. In fact they were bombing the railway line, to stop the Germans from using it. She took the boy from the pram and lay down over him, like this, by the water. And the pressure ripped the pram away from me and drove it right up to the rails. And I was next to her. And when it stopped we put the boy straight into the pram and rushed off home. On the way I saw a woman, I saw it as a child – her whole lungs exposed, and a handbag on them. She was dead, of course. That was on the way. That was the first air strike when nobody warned us that they were flying here. I don’t know how that could have happened. And my friend who lived in the same house as me... It was right on Sunday. So she was in Cejl – I’m from Cejl, you know, I was living there. And she was there at cinema Rádio, buying the tickets, and her life ended there. On that Sunday. She was as old as me.”

“Mother reckoned: ‘Well, nothing can happen to a child.’ So I used to go either with the women, or with the men to work in the morning. And we would go on foot from Maloměřice to Cejl., and I always left the group and went to our house, where I used to live. I would visit one lady there, she always let me catch up on my sleep. And she also bought new shoes for me because I already had none. The only shoes sold at the time were clos, and I remember she bought me clogs. And in the evening I waited for them agani, after six o’clock. As they came back I joined them and went back with them. And because my father was drawn to the place as well, because he thought he might find out something about us there, so we met there one day. And he cried so much when he saw me. Because my head was all shaven, I was gaunt. Well, and... I’ll tell you something that probably hurt Mum. When we came to the camp we stood in a line in one big room. And he kept saying: “You’ll hand in everything here, all your earrings, watches, you’ll put it here on the table...’ And he said: ‘You won’t leave this place alive anyway.’ I looked at Mum and said: ‘I hate Dad.’ And that hurt her terribly.”

“I remember it was something of a largish village. There was a big school, and they took the wounded soldiers there. We went there to watch them, always when they brought them. And I also remember there were some such, partisans, how they dragged them from the forest. That was horrible too... And we also ran from there once. My grandpa lived directly at the track and there was a high bridge there, and they started bombing it again, so we fled into the forest. And we stayed there the whole night and went home in the morning. So it was there as well, but it was better after all. But we heard that they really did bomb Brno often. We could hear it there. Even though it was fifty kilometres away.”

“My father, he always had this kind of business spirit, so... There was absolutely nothing here. No curtains, no cloth... Cloth was rationed, food was rationed, everything... And I got double ration stamps because I was underweight. And he always sent some things, and that kept us alive somehow. First of all an excellent French cognac. ...wait, but actually that was still during the war. It was during the war because that was when my little brother was born. A my mother told me – it was a home birth, and a doctor was with her there, and he kept pouring himself that French cognac. But the other people saw the postman was coming often. And so they snitched on us. The Germans came and took everything, everything.”