Jitka Bubeníková

"They were people who had nothing to do with the war. They lived throughout all war and lived quite poorly, just making money by repairing the jewelry. And Dad said, 'Leave these people there. They know how to do it, they know what's wrong with that jewelry. Because it was the world jewelry, right. So, they said he was a collaborator, slowly. He had problems because of that. He said, 'Expel the factory workers then, but leave the factories, leave the people who worked there. They didn't do anything, they didn't fight."

"Russian officers were in our apartment, and I know I saw them wiping the floor or something, they poured a bucket of water into a toilet, but everything went out of the toilet. And then my mom told me, almost before she died, that there were two, I think there were two, that one of them tried to abuse my mom. My dad went to report it and he was immediately... I don't know whether they even shot him or not. However, they stole the wheels. Dad had 195, so he had a special bike, higher, I know the bike was yellow, and it was stolen also from my mother, so the wheels disappeared."

“Mr Balcar says, ‘Come to the bunker’. And my dad retorts, ‘Nothing will come out of it again.’ We looked up into the sky, it was beautiful, blue, but three bombs were already falling down. They were silver, a beautiful picture it was. We didn’t even manage to run across the street. So we went directly home, into our cellar. I knelt on the ground, had my head covered by a sack, I prayed… and I was terribly afraid. And then the bomb went off at the station, the pressure wave blew out the chimney door and we were like chimney sweepers. The soot was everywhere.”

“We went in cattle wagons for the convention. These were wagons for cattle, they had a bar and a sliding door. We sat in a row, held onto the bars and kicked our legs in the rhythm of the drive. We slept in a gym, there were pallets, no beds, but pallets. Then we did the exercise with hoops. We ran with them but the day before it rained heavily so we kept falling into poodles. And that was it.”

“Then, when the war was over, prisoners went from wall to wall. It was a dreadful sight, they walked on crutches, some had just one leg, heads bandaged, dirty. I ran into our garden and hid behind the currant. I was looking at them and saw the Balcars, our friends, giving them water from a window. And I thought, ‘Well, the Balcars, they give something to drink to those hideous Germans.’”