Ludmila Kleinová

"The houses stood in five rows and the life was happy and friendly there, as if in a village. Everyone knew each other. The women rarely went to work, it was the men who earned the livelihood as miners. Folks would sit on their porches, drink coffee and life was good. In the colony, people organised harvest festivals, May celebrations, there was a football field and the Sokol sports club playground and a puppet theatre. There were nice houses where the engineer lived. And I remember a house where the foremen lived. Those had nice two-room flats with bathrooms unlike us in the colony with shared outhouses."

"A Yugoslavian guy came, he brought us a basket of figs and started crying that there's a war back in our home. And we laughed and didn't belive him and he told us that we would find out that there is a war indeed. It was hard for them. They brought mil for our children and they would give us the shirts off their backs. The Yugoslavians sympathised with us, it surprised me a bit. They even let us exchange Czech money so that we could get back home."

"I saw damaged houses. One half stood there as usual and the other half, one could see furniture and everything. I don't remember which houses those were exactly, I was nearly out of my mind. When we got to the cemetery, there was a mass grave for the dead and they were throwing bodies in it."

“Dad used to tell me that on the 1st of May, there are parades and music plays. This would take place at the main square in Přívoz and it was a merry event. I had a friend named Věra Halfarová and she persuaded me to go and have a look. We walked all alone down the Nádražní Street to Přívoz – and nothing was going on there. But we saw people looting the shops.” “You mean they were stealing things?” “Yes, they were breaking the shop windows and stealing things. They thought nobody would find out. We were just watching it, one was taking some handkerchiefs, another one took other stuff. I was just shouting something at Věra in distress when the police came – and we ran as if for our lives. We were scared. We expected music and we saw looters instead.“

“It was terrible. At the time of the worst air raids in Ostrava, I had sore eyes and I was hospitalised in the ophthalmology ward in the Fifejdy hospital. And then, dad found out that a bomb fell in the hospital so he came and looked for me. Then he practically stole me from the hospital, he did not care what I was wearing or not. Simply, he wanted me at home so much and he took me away from there. He had a bike and we rode on that bike. Between the hospital and the cemetery, there was a sort of embankment and I and dad walked across. When we got closer to the cemetery, I saw how they carted the wounded. At that time, I think, there was the largest fire in Rütgers, that was a chemical plant in Mariánské Hory. They were transporting burned men from there. It was horrible. They, you know, cried, someone screamed in pain. And then we rode across Ostrava and I saw halfway torn down, gutted houses where I saw furniture and other household items. It was horrible. But that bomb in hospital did not go off.”