“Somebody banged on the door. My mother went to look who was there and there was a German soldier. He had a coil on his back and he was collecting phone lines. The German army was retreating towards Brno. He knocked on the door and said politely that he needed some rest and asked if we had a free bed at home. My mother was probably afraid of Soviet soldiers later finding him in our home sleeping in our bed, that wouldn’t be great, so she told him: “Ein bet kein at our home.” And he gave us a salute and left, without trying to get inside using violence. Of course he could have. So that was interesting.”
“At that moment people realised that war posed other dangers too. It was very dangerous for young girls or women who couldn’t really go to the town square and start hugging them (Soviet soldiers – ed. note). Because that would immediately put them in great danger. I personally remember that our whole family was locked up in the basement and my sister was rolled up in a carpet and partially covered in coal. Our mother was also hidden somewhere in the attic. People were coming and going all the time. And then the tanks left and another wave of those Cossack fighters arrived, they rode those horse carriages.”
“My first unforgettable experience was when I saw two Russian soldiers, I mean those Cossacks, in front of the house. One of them was holding an alarm clock and, most probably out of drunkenness or maybe they were fighting over the clock, one of them shot the other one. Later, as an adult, I realised that war is probably something terrible, when people lose the notion of how valuable a human life is. People who came from so far away and experienced so many dangerous situations, and in the end they don’t even mind losing their life because of an ordinary alarm clock.”
“I remember my experience. I had this watching spot on the balcony. And I even had a telescope, a tripod and a slingshot, like boys usually have. And without any siren sounding, I saw that from north of Brno there were five jets flying. And when they approached and turned around I found out that they were English jets with that English sign, they were Spitfires. They even flew so low and close that I saw the pilot. And they were the so-called “kotlaři”, that was what people called them, because they would destroy everything along the railway and try to paralyse the Germans’ railway transport system. And when there was a train on the railroad and they detected it, they would shoot through the locomotive in short bursts of fire and put it out of order.”
Jindřich Homolka was born in Hrušovany u Brna in 1931. As a small boy he witnessed the welcoming of President Masaryk at the Hrušovany train station. After finishing the local elementary school he enrolled in a secondary school in Židlochovice in 1940, during the Protectorate era. During the Second World War he witnessed the air raids of the so-called „kotlaři“ - low-flying attack pilots - aimed at the local railway. In 1945 he saw the arrival of the Cossack units of the Red Army to Hrušovany. In 1945 he also learned about the inhumane treatment of the deported Germans during the so-called march of death between Brno and Pohořelice. After the war he studied at the 3rd real gymnasium in Brno, and later at the VUT and the Faculty of Railway Structures in Prague. During his employment he specialised in transport and railway constructions, especially bridges. After 1989 he spent some time working in a private company, then he retired. As of 2016, he lived with his wife in their flat in Strašnice, Prague 10.
