Josef Veltruský

“It was here too, they threw these bombs at us. And I was somewhere outside and didn’t make it home so I hid by this gate and the bombs were falling all over Mělník. And when it was over I ran home and started looking for Mum and she was nowhere to be found. And then I found her in the yard and I hear her crying. And I go back to the goat and she was there with the goat, she spent the bombing with the goat, waiting for it to pass. And I told her: “Come outside, it’s over!” And so she was crying there.”

“We were told what to do so first we went to Kamenický Šenov. And we went door to door and we were waking the people up, where the Germans lived. And we told them to pack 30 kilograms of things per person, now I don’t know if it was 30 or 35, but never mind. It doesn’t matter anymore. And we told them that within an hour they are supposed to be at that small town square, in Kamenický Šenov, that they would be evacuated. There was already this carriage or two, there were about two. And they rounded up the people there, the Germans. And from there we… well we heard a lot of German curses, probably, we didn’t speak much German. It was pretty drastic. But there was no other way, we had to obey as soldiers. But it probably wouldn’t go any other way because the people, who experienced a lot in the occupied are, our Czech people who had to run away from there, they experienced a lot of bad things too.”