Františka Vitulová

"There was an air raid on Ostrava, and in order for the planes to see clearly, because most of the bombing took place at night, they also threw out trees, it was like a small tree beautifully lit up, and then they could see where to drop the bombs, because otherwise blackout was mandatory, everyone had to have blacked out windows so that the planes couldn't see where the houses were, where anything was located. That's why they planted the trees so that they could see Ostrava. It was warm and we sat outside and watched Ostrava being bombed. When the raid was over and one plane was coming back, the last one, and opposite us across the river, on the other hill, there was a farmer and he had a maid, he had two children, a girl and a boy, a little older than me, and they were also outside and the wife, she was so snarky, funny... there was a sign that when they waved the flashlight at the plane, it was a sign that the Germans were there, and they came back and bombed. So, she did it like that, when the plane was almost over the mountains, she waved, and at that moment it returned and dropped two bombs exactly where it was. They were outside, the farmer pulled the boy down, they lay on the ground, so the shrapnel didn't do any harm to them. But the mother, the little girl and the maid ran home, it hit them, their mother was dead on spot, the maid too and Anička, she was two years older than me, her little hand had not grown up as normal. She kept visiting hospitals and they kept operating on her. But she grew up and married, but that hand always remained that small.'

"When the front crossed here through Domaslavice, the Soviets came to liberate us and the Germans were pushing back, that was in May, wasn't it? And my father said to me in the morning: 'Go and herd the geese.' So, I went to herd the geese and my friend, who lived next door and went to school with me, came to me because she saw me herding the geese, and suddenly someone fired a shot and they shot me. Nothing happened to the friend. My father was at home, so he came quickly and looked, because he was once a soldier, to see if it had crossed my stomach. Down by the water during the protectorate there was a military doctor and soldiers and so on. So he came to our house and looked at me and said: 'There must have been a bomb somewhere.' And we kids said: 'Nothing exploded anywhere, someone shot at me.' He said: 'I can't do anything about it, you have to go to the hospital.'' There used to be no ambulances like there are now. So my mother went to the farmer's house, there they harnessed a horse and a buggy and put me in that wagon and took me away from us to the hospital in Frydek. That's about eleven kilometres. Well, they put me in that room and a young doctor was pulling out the bullet. And as he pulled it out, he then showed it to me in the palm of his hand and said: 'Little girl, I would so like to keep this as a memory that I pulled that bullet out of such a little girl.' So they stitched me up and I stayed in the hospital for two weeks before they sent me back home.'