Jiří Cimrman

"As a curious child, I used to go there to see how the trenches [around Mariánovice] were being dug, and there was also a column behind the farm where these people had set up an outdoor forge so they could sharpen or sharpen their pickaxes. And I liked going there very much, because the two workers who sharpened the pickaxes there were called Jirkass like me. So we became close, so I would go there and we would talk about things. What, I don't know. I just know that when I mentioned it at home, that after the war, or at some point, my parents told me that they helped these two Jirkas escape when the war was coming to an end, when it was obvious that it wasn't going to be long, so they helped them to hide with us. They never came back [from the camp]. They were with us somewhere hiding in the hay and the next day somehow, I don't know what, they just disappeared. I know that my mother told me that she was very scared because it was when the snow was still falling, and there were footprints that could be seen leaving the place and not coming. So she was afraid if they happened to go looking for them, that they wouldn't find by the footprints that they were hiding there. Well, so of course they made new tracks that went back and forth, several times, to cover it up."

"That's where I spent my wartime childhood. Benesov was in an area where we didn't experience bombing because there were no objects that deserved bombing. There we only experienced the so-called boilermakers, which [for] those who don't know, were fighter planes, mostly American, they were mustangs. They were flying low over the tracks there looking for trains. What's interesting about that is that the way it was done from them was that they would first fly over the train, circle, flap their wings, and our engineers and the people who, if it was a passenger train, they all knew this, so as soon as they saw it, they would jump out into the fields next door and run away. The fighter flew in, did a ratata and it was over, that's why they were called 'boilermakers'. The steam rolled out of the locomotive and they were actually destroying transport, which was more or less working for the benefit of the then German Reich. So that was kind of the only event of the war that was going on there. The thing that sticks in my mind is that I saw the pilot of this fighter directly, because we were right in the middle of that circular yard and he was obviously curious to see what was there, so he flew low, circled slowly and smiled at us. And he was a black man, that's why I remember that, because I could see his white teeth. So he was the first black man I ever saw in my life."