"In our family, dad ate first, then children, and what was left was taken by Mom. She had it set like that in her head. She tried her best. A piece of bread with margarine was a snack to take to school and for dinner too. But we were lucky that we had a family in Spálov u Oder and they sent us something from the pigskilling, for example. And then my grandfather had a house and a large garden in Skrochovice. I remember that we went to Svinov, where there was a border. He could come there and so could we. We met there and he could give us something there. We also had to give some fruit to those officers. Grandpa bred a lot of pigeons, so he also brought us pigeons, a rabbit, but it wasn't always like that."
"I have bad memories of the Russians because they didn't know what a toilet was. They climbed into bed and urinated on mattresses. They used it as a toilet. It was terrible. My dad always told me, 'When you hear the rumbling footsteps, hide all the clocks under the couch.' So I hid the clocks from the Russians. A bike was a devil machine for them. They were soldiers who came in the front line, such a rabble. What they didn't steal, they didn't have. They were followed by officers and those were finally intelligent people. They were even sewing at my dad´s place. They told him that he should go to Moscow to sew, that he would be well paid there."
"I know my dad listened to a foreign radio station, that he listened to London. We had an SS man in our house behind the wall. He was at a front, but his parents lived there. One day he came on vacation, saying that he heard it and that he would report us. But his mother, Mrs. Hudková, told his son, "You can't do that because they are very good people." Then we didn't listen to the radio at our house anymore, but we walked across the station to an acquaintance from Přívoz."
"The alarm blared and we went to the shelter in the basement. I took a doll under my arm and a kettle of water because we didn't know how long we would be there. This was repeated several times. I went to school on Nádražní třída, it was called U hodin. It was near the former Svoboda cinema. We had to go to the shelter sometimes several times a night and in the morning we went to school normally. And my dad always said to me, 'Never stay in that shelter at school.' He had this tape on his hand and was tasked with chasing people who were outside at the time of the alarm to go to the shelter. So, he always said he would come for me, and he did. He got there through various alley ways, so I was never in that school shelter."
"The cousin Rudolf had a guitar and he played the guitar, and I was in Skrochovice with another cousin. He already knew he would be deported, so we told him to leave the guitar to us, even though we didn’t know how to play, and he said, 'I'd rather break it than leave it to the Czechs.' "
My (Jarmila's) uncle from Nový Jičín settled in a villa confiscated from the Germans. He still had one of the original owners in the basement. "And he didn't treat him very well. The German was an educated man, and her uncle made it clear to him that he was German. My parents kept telling him to treat him a little differently. Well...The confiscation was enough, wasn't it?”
"The residents were half Czechs and half Germans in the house on Mariánskohorská Street. Family Hudkovi lived next door and they had a son within the SS, who once returned unexpectedly on vacation. My dad was listening to foreign radio he had on the wall, and their son wanted to turn us in. However, his mother begged him not to do it, because we are good neighbors and that they sew for us - so he did not do it. After that my father stoped listenning the radio at home and we went to Ostrava – Přivoz to his acquaintance to listen to the broadcast ‘London calling.‘”
Jarmila Potomáková, neé Olbrichová, was born on September 20, 1933 in Slezská Ostrava. She was growing up in Ostrava-Přívoz, where she also spent the war times. She experienced the first and the largest bombing of Ostrava during the World War II in August 1944. She is also a witness to the liberation of Ostrava by the Red Army in April 1945. Their apartment was hit by a grenade during the fighting. Her father, Alois Olbrich, was a private tailor. He ran the business with one assistant in their house. After February 1948, when the communist dictatorship began in Czechoslovakia, he faced the pressure to join the service cooperative. He ended his trade in 1967, when he started working for the Míroděv company. He died a year later. Jarmila was not allowed to study as the daughter of a self-employed person. After a year course of shorthand and typewriting, she joined Stavby sídlišť, later called Bytostav in Ostrava. She married the firefighter Josef Potomák and they had two children together. She had worked as a secretary in the Fire and Rescue Service of the Vítkovické železárny company until her retirement.
