Anna Mertová

“My youngest brother Tonda studied in Olomouc to become a priest, but then they took over the monasteries and he was interned in Broumov and then came home. He was then called for military service, to join the technical auxiliary battalions. They built the airport in Sliač. After about three years they were released. Then he looked for a job. He worked as a conductor on freight trains, then as a medic in a hospital. That’s where he met his wife-to-be, who worked there as a nurse and who had originally also wanted to join a convent. After their wedding, they moved to Brno, had a son and that son is now a priest.”

“There were dive bombers. What a roar it was when they approached the city. There was this hill between us and the city Znojmo, and my elder siblings would go there to watch Znojmo being bombed. We had to draw all the curtains, there had to be no light whatsoever, so that they wouldn’t target us too. There were inspections, checking whether no light showed through. The dive bombers were terrible. What a roar.”

“My eldest brother was a forced laborer. I don’t know if he was ever in Germany, but at the end of the war he was in some factory in Austria. In 1945, in the winter, he and his friend ran away and came home. They had to hide in our attic until the end of the war. It was life or death for all of us. If someone had given us away, my parents would have surely suffered the consequences too. But they made it through until the end of the war. His friend was called Juránek.”