Jaroslav Kadaně

"An American convoy with trucks would arrive every morning, and bring German POWs, who were picking whatever was left and placing it in coffins. These were not regular coffins, but rather boxes that could fit four or five bodies, or whatever was left from them. When they cleaned it up, we went to have a look at the cinema building, and what we saw – children this big. These were bodies burnt by the fire, and a human body then sort of shrinks... When the alarm sounded, these people went to take shelter in the basement. But the building caught fire, and when the people felt it was too hot in the basement, they crawled into that drum. They were boiled to death inside. Completely. The American soldiers were taking the corpses out through the holes and windows in small pieces. That was really horrible."

"You can imagine what it was like when the Americans were leaving. They had chocolate and what not, and the German women really ran after them. Young girls, and young ladies, and well, those black men, and white men... they slept together, and when they were leaving, they had this inscription on their tank: You German whores, we are going to our dear wives."

"We were going to downtown Prague to look at people welcoming them. Well, only some people welcomed them, the majority was against them. But Prague was quite German. We stood at the corner of the Na Můstku Street, in the direction of the Masaryk station and with our backs turned against the Municipal House. That was what we saw. I was employed in the shop of Mr. Kapr in Žižkov, and later, the Germans – soldiers, who were stationed in Prague neighbourhoods – began coming to our shop because they had money. One German Mark was worth ten Czech Crowns. It was awful how much food they sometimes bought. I still remember vividly: one day when I was in the shop, four German soldiers came in and bought a lot of sausages. They hung the wreaths of sausages around their necks, paid for them and left. They were biting into the sausages happily – without any bread or bread roll or anything. Each of them had some ten or fifteen sausages hung around his neck."

"We boarded the train in the evening at the Main Station, and we arrived to our destination the following morning. They came to pick us up, they probably had documents where it was already decided which carriage would go where. All the people in all the train carriages were sent there for conscripted labour. They were calling our names, and saying: ´You go there, and you go there… ´ We were told to stand in the corner of some hall, there were some fifty of us, and we waited what would happen. About five Germans in civilian clothing then came to us, they spoke together at first, and then they started calling: ´Who of you is a baker (Bäckerei), a painter, and Fleischer?´ We raised our hands – I, certain Ludvík Hůlka, and Pepík Kupr. One of these Germans picked all three of us…"