MUDr. Anna Husová

"Then suddenly, it was the time when the friendly armies arrived. We lived in Karlín neighbourhood and one morning, out of the blue, when we were happily minding our own lives, a neighbour banged on the door, yelling: 'Get up quickly, the Russian occupation is here!' We were stunned, we ran to the windows to look out and on the Sokolovská street, there were armoured vehicles going down the street, the soldiers had guns pointed out at the windows, a terrible noise, when the tanks rode down the street paved with cobblestones, there was a terrible clamour. We were all terribly scared, terribly surprised."

"Not much changed for us, dad had closed his company down before this all happened [before the February 1948 Communist coup, after which practically all privately owned businesses were nationalised]. Then he did all sorts of manual labour but he never complained. The more complicated thing... There was stuff going on which I did not understand at all and couldn't grasp them. When the Orlík dam was being built, dad had a nice house which hehad built. In 1946/47, he closed the company down, he now did not own a business but he was left with a house. Then the construction of the dam started and he was dispossessed of the house so he was fifty, he had nothing at all and he had nowhere to go. We had to tear the house down, to take it apart entirely."

"Finally, the long-awaited end of war was here, the 8th of May. Most of the Germans were either in captivity or dead. There was no more Gestapo in our village. American soldiers arrived riding their jeeps and with them, joy and happiness. And, for the first time in our lives, we saw a black person, he wore the uniform of the US army officer. For us children, it was a stunning experience."

"Our dad and his raftsmen used their raft to smuggle food to Prague. They would reach the shore in the Smíchov port during the night and at a prearranged time and place, they threw the bags of flour or something similar on the bank. Obviously, sometimes there was an unexpected check and they rather drowned the bag of food instead of getting punished."

"And it thus happened that on the very same night, Mrs. Dobye, her fourteen-year-old son Yura, her eight-year-old daguther Natasha and her six-week-old baby girl Zdenichka moved to our place. They were hiding in the cottage in the back room, and when there was a risk of some unexpected control or unknown people visiting, they ran, if they managed to, to the woods or at least to the barn to hide away."