Miroslav Surovec

“That day, it was on May 2, 1945, dad was standing by the wicket in front of our house and a convoy of German horse-drawn wagons and horses had been passing by already for several days continuously, and they were already retreating. I was looking at them from the window, and suddenly two of them ran there. They arrived to the Virgin Mary church with a tank, but it was just a surveying tank… The two Soviets ran down and what is interesting – and I saw it – each of them carried a submachine gun over his shoulder. They ran in there and fired into the transport. The horses startled, some remained lying on the ground, and as the convoy was passing down the Revolution Street, there was probably some of their sentry, and they blasted the bridge – it was the old bridge, now there is the new bridge, by ‘Kolo.’ They let the bridge explode even with their own people on it.”

“We used to go to swim to the Ostravice River in one place which was called Na Dvanáctce, and there was a deep place dug up by a dredger, and while Ostravice is normally quite shallow, this place was deep enough that we could even jump into water head first there from that concrete embankment. I was there with one other boy and boys from Hitlerjugend came there with their leader; they came for a swim as well. At first he said something to us, but naturally we didn’t understand them, but from their gesticulation it was obvious that they wanted us to get out of there. We were not too keen on that, and he thus issued an order, and those kids dipped their towels in water and they started beating us with them… Well, they gave us a threshing and we had to get out of there [laughing].”