Marie Machačová

„I was standing at the St. Wenceslas’ statue [in the upper part of the Wenceslas Square] and waiting for the No. 3 tram to go to Strašnice. And suddenly, people looked up. And some thing or another, maybe twenty or thirty centimeters long, it was shining up there and it was falling down. So that the German soldier, he spoke Czech to me, he might have been from a mixed family. And he grabbed my hand and asked: ‘What are you doing here?’ He held me so tight that I couldn’t un away so he dragged me into that house. Only a year ago when a friend took me there, I found out that it was actually a hotel where we darted just behind the door. And we didn’t get any further, he just closed the door and the bombs were falling. He must be dead for a long time now because I’m quite a bit aged now. And that time, I don’t know how old the boy could have been, he could be 30. He saved my life. And at home, they knew nothing, they thought I was roaming somewhere. And I begged my mom: ‘Mummy, please, I was not wandering someplade, but, Prague is in ruins.’ Nobody wanted to believe it. The guys sat on their bikes and when they returned, they said: ‘There’re soo many people on the ground, everything is upside down. The trams are in shreds.’ I saw it all so I have this memory. It was not good. I felt sorry for the people.”

„Next door from us, a Boding family lived and they were Jews as well. They had two or three children and those went as well. And mom said, ‘Go!’ and even though we could not be friends with them, we were not allowed to play with them, it was an exception when mom sent us there and told us: ‘Tell your goodbyes, they have to go away.’ She did not tell us where. And those poor folks went to the concentration camp. The flat remained empty.”

„Mom was a cleaner in the Czech Press Agency so I went to the end of the street and then to the right and there was the Petschke’s palace [where the Prague headquarters of the Gestapo was seated]. Mom, when she came home, she cried and said that lorries came and how they had killed the Heydrich guy, they just picked all the people on the Wenceslas’ square, everyone, were they young or anyone. And so she said that they cleaned up the whole square, lorries arrived, Germans [driving them] and they took all the people to the Petschke’s palace and they beat them there and some even lost their lives. And I could hear it on the street when I walked by, I heard how they scream, their cries for help.”

„And the farm of Mr. Švehla was up there and I used to go there to get eggs and milk. But the milk smelled so lovely so I had a drink from the can and when I went home, I found out that I drank quite a bit. I went back to the farm and I told them that I knocked over and spilled the milk. They filled the can up to the brim and told me. ‚Do have a drink‘, but I couldn’t tell them that my stomach is already full of milk, that I had already drank a lot. When I brought it home, mom praised me, she gathered the cream from the top and churned butter because during the war, we only had a little of butter.”