Hana Vondráčková

“I remember that during the air raids we had to run to the basement to hide, and I kept a shoebox next my bed and I had my doll there. My mom would thus always grab me, I would grab the doll and we would run down to the basement. There were about five apartments with families... Dad constructed a kind of a frame in the basement, and they placed blankets and duvets over it, and my parents slept there. For me, they tied two wicker armchairs together, and I fit in there just fine, and I slept in those armchairs. We cooked in the basement, too, and we simply lived there… The only thing we heard in the basement – I don’t know if you even know what a basement looks like – there was a small sliding window from the sidewalk used for supplying coal. When they delivered coal they threw it in there through that opening. We could hear the heavy armoured boots of German soldiers just a few metres away from us. They could have just opened the window, thrown something in there, and perhaps I would not have even been telling this to you today.”

“My dad worked in the bank in the Na Příkopech Street, and he went by tram to a funeral in Modřany, but he did not arrive there. The tram stopped by the Jirásek Bridge and they told the passengers ‘you need to take cover somewhere,’ and ‘let’s go, everybody, we will hide in that house on the corner.’ That was the closet place to hide. My dad and several other people ran down to the embankment; there were public toilets there. Perhaps they are still there, I don’t know. They hid in the toilets. There was an enormous blast, and he then told us that the blast wave was so strong that they all rolled on the ground. When it was over and they got out, the house where all the other passengers from the tram ran to hide was in ruins. None of them survived.”