Miroslava Molíková

"When the front was coming and the shooting was coming, we went to that shelter. And we were hidden there. I remember my dad came out of the shelter and in front of the door that we had to the street, to the fields, he observed through binoculars what the place looked like. And apparently the Russians saw him, so they fired. And it was Sunday at quarter to eight in the evening when Dad quickly went into the shelter and said, 'We've got to get out of here.' We're going to rush to the common shelter, which was under the malt house, where all the citizens of Mořice were, because it was a huge space and some of them had clothes and blankets and I don't know what all with them. But we didn't have anything with us, only my mother had a milk jug, in which, before we went into our little garden shelter, she put our personal documents and what she thought was necessary, and we took it with us to the shelter. Well, we were in that shelter that was under the malt house for about two and a half days. And we didn't see the first Russian soldiers going through Mořice in that shelter until Tuesday at nine thirty in the evening. And because the Germans had made a machine-gun nest out of our house, and Haná, that's an area that's flat, that you can see very far, so when they were approaching, the Germans drove them back by shooting, so that the Russians had no choice but to set fire to the three places from which the Germans were defending themselves. Our house, the roof of the church and the roof of the malt house. So when we came out of that common shelter and approached our house and saw the pile of rubble, we all cried. That was the first time I'd ever seen my dad cry. So as we were approaching the ruin, there were some Soviet soldiers coming towards us. And when he saw that we were crying, he asked my mother, but he must have been a citizen who understood the Czech language. So my mother pointed: 'That was our house, we don't have it anymore. Where are we going to go?' And the Soviet soldier said: 'You have a husband. You have...,' -that's what he did- 'You have children, and I have nothing. I'm alone. My wife and children killed.'"

"My mum was a very talkative person and liked to be around people. So if, for example, six people came over at once, they would all sit around the radio and listen. My dad had on a front gate, and we didn't have a little door, but we had a gate that you drove through with the cattle and the seed drill and everything. So he had some kind of a device made on the entrance gate that if somebody from the outside would open the gate, that a weight would fall down and make a sound that somebody was coming. So when they were listening, my dad would always sit closest to the door to that passage so he could hear if somebody was coming, he'd be able to stop the radio in a hurry. Mum always had some buns or milk from the cows or something set up on the table, so it would look like there were guests in for a chat, but they weren't listening to anything. So that was a trick that I still remember."