Alena Jiroušková

“One day he came to us and announced: ‘Russians are here.’ We all ran out of the basement and there were six Russian soldiers standing there. They had submachine guns over their shoulders and they were looking around; they were some vanguard. People immediately began offering them plum brandy and whatever they had, but the soldiers didn’t take anything. They didn’t take anything from us, because they did not trust us, they did not know who we were. Then the uncle who had been on the Russian front began speaking to them in Russian and we could see that the tension was going away. It occurred to him to take some of the food and put it into his mouth, and he drank some of the plum brandy. When they saw that the food was not poisoned, they immediately began to feast with us. Then the fun went on and we even began learning Russian.”

“Later we received a package and inside the package there was dad’s suit, his shirt and his undershirt and… you cannot wash blood. The Germans were so precise that they had washed everything, but the clothes had large brown blood stains everywhere. We thus knew that he had been through hell there, together with all the others. He was then taken to Brno, and there he was executed, shot, on October 20th.”