Alois Dostál

"They were finished at the bakery, so they went to the store and my dad weighed sugar and flour for my mom in one-kilo bags. In those days, when he bought it, they brought it to him in sacks: a seventy-five-kilo bag of sugar. Old ladies would come by, and since sugar beet was grown in the region, they didn't buy much sugar, half a kilo maybe, just enough to make sweet buns. They could have bought three kilos but that was a lot of money. They had no money. That's why they put it in smaller bags. Then they heard this noise, it was in '37, and my father told me later that those were military planes flying from Pardubice to Prague. There is a big military base in Pardubice. We would watch them; they would fly their route over us. One of our relatives was a pilot, and when he flew over Němčice, he would rock his wings. Us boys got on the roof so Venda the pilot could see us. That's how the planes would fly, and that was the noise. Vlasta says to dad, 'Boss,' - even his friends called him Boss - 'I'll take alook at the yard, there must be a lot of planes!' He went into the yard and saw smoke coming from the barn. He came running in and said, 'Our barn's on fire!'"

"Back in '39 or maybe '38, as we were being occupied in the autumn with snow flying about, people were stocking up for the war. My father took me to Kolín, the district town. I had been to Kolín maybe once or twice as a kid, for a festival or an annual fair, as it was called. Grandfather took all of us grandchildern to town, bought us cotton candy and took us to swings and what not, all four of us. You know the folk song that says Kolín is situated on a plain? Well, there's no plain in Kolín, not even in the square. It's all hills. The Kouřimská Street is the steepest. It's really uphill like that. There was a clothing store on the left, Jew Audolenský's. Now, there are only brass signs in front of the shops in the walkways. They put in these brass signs with their names - and that's all over Kolín. Really, most of the merchants were Jewish. We went in, he had me try a coat on... There were already trucks on the edges, each with a cannon hitched at the back. The Germans were in town. A full square. Cars all over, the Wehrmacht. As we walked out, I remember my dad saying, 'Those are German soldiers.' I didn't care. Do you know why? I had my winter coat on. In those days you wore pants half short or half long. You wore stockings below the knees and lace-up boots. I reached into the breast pocket of the winter coat. Imagine what I found in there: a little book, a mirror on one side and a comb on the other side, like in a drawer. I loved that! Even if the Germans were shooting at us right there, I wouldn't t care. That's my lovely memory."