Eva Mečlová

"One evening someone knocked on the door and a group of Russians came in, they were staying in the police officers’ building, the younger ones in tents. And he came with some officer’s flunkey, and also the son of the farmer, who owned the farm next door and in whose room we were staying. And they said, 'You're going to sleep with me. You have fifteen minutes to get her to sleep, and then I'll come.' And if she doesn't, they'll... they'll shoot her. This was the house we lived in, and the room had two windows in the front at the level of the raised first floor. And so my mother put a coat over my nightgown, she was already in her nightgown too, she put our shoes on, sat me on the window, opened the window and jumped under the window. We were in complete dark and she told me: 'Evička, you mustn't cry, even if something hurts you,' so I jumped into her arms and she dragged me down the street towards the village square, there was the police house, they were called “četníci” back then. She dragged me through the ditch, there was mud, and in a moment I saw that they were shooting at something in the street. My mother dragged me to the police station, because supposedly there was someone there who would stand up for us, she dragged me up the stairs, there were wounded soldiers lying there, probably Russians. We didn’t find any policemen there, so my mother said: ‘We have to go to aunt Hepová.’ So she dragged me to the other end of the street to my aunt's, we woke her up and we spent the night there. In the morning she went to tell the policemen, they told her that they already knew and that they had reported it to their command. They lined them up, but they didn't shoot them. However, they had some punishment. It was a horror and then we learned in school about our liberators and about how grateful we will be to them and I always remembered this horror that we went through."

"My father never got out of the concentration camp, because at the beginning of May of 1945 they took the prisoners out of the concentration camp and they had to march to the port of Hamburg, and there they had to embark on two ships, where there were over three thousand prisoners in total. One of the ships was called the Cap Arcona, and this is actually supported by evidence, there was a film made about it about twenty years ago. And my father got on the Cap Arcona and the next day, or if it was the same day that they boarded them, the English, who probably didn't know, bombed them. The prisoners were all below decks, the Gestapo had lifeboats ready, and if anybody managed to get away from that boat and swim a little bit, they were able to shoot them in the water. It was a horrible massacre."

"After the war, when the war was over, my father was missing because we didn’t know about this. Dad was missing, and mom was going to Prague to different offices and facilities where returning prisoners gathered, and still didn’t find out anything. Because he was missing, neither my mother nor I were entitled to any pension or child benefits, but that wouldn't have been the main thing. The main thing was that nobody knew what was going on with my father. And after the war, there are also records of this, there used to be a radio show called Living Words on Sundays at nine o'clock in the morning, and there was always somebody telling their stories from the war. And one time, we were lucky, because my mother had the radio on, and E. F. Burian was just speaking, and he was telling this story. He was talking about what happened to the prisoners, and then he read a list of the Czech prisoners who were there. My mother immediately went to Prague and asked for an audience with him, so they talked about it, and he said that he had obtained the list, but he didn't know my father personally. Of that large number of prisoners, only over thirty were saved. So at least we knew that now. Of course, as we didn’t have his death certificate, there was no proof, so we got nothing again."