“We did not return to the factory anymore, but instead we went home through Nemušice together with a young friend of mine. Her name was Růža Utíkalová, they had a house and a forest there, and they raised cows. The Utíkal family had several children, and at the time of the air raid, two of them were inside the house and the parents were plowing a field by the forest. Their sister was coming back from Telegrafia, and she continued on her way home and their house got a direct hit... There is a street of victims of 24th August. Růža Utíkalová arrived to me on a bike from their neighbours and she came to tell me that the two little children broke out a window in the last moment and they ran away to the neighbours and thus they have saved their lives.”
“Valčík, one of the partisans whom they shot to death… There was hotel Veselka here, in the place where the savings bank is now… Valčík worked there as a waiter for some time, but they were actually preparing for the assassination. The assassination took place in Prague but these people were living here… He was serving beer and listening... German officers were coming to Veselka. He was one of the paratroopers who were dispatched here and who later perished in that church in Prague.”
“The second air raid on 24th August took place after noon, it was done by Americans. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining and an alarm was sounded: ‘Achtung, Achtung!’ We thus ran away again, but since we had already been running away for no reason so many times before and then coming back again, we ran to Nemušice, and some employees even jumped into the river Chrudimka there and they went for a swim, but all of a sudden we saw explosions and blasts in the direction of the airport… We got into some backyard into a shed for animals, and people were kneeling inside and praying and American airplanes were slowly flying over us. We could see the shiny airplanes and it was the air raid on the old railway station, the petrol station and the airport… total of 213 victims. There was a public shelter in the railway station and moms with children ran in there, and the shelter got hit directly… After the first air raid, which had 43 victims, Germans organized a funeral as a sign of protest that the Allies were enemies.”
Helena Zářecká was born June 15, 1928 in Pardubice in the family of electrician Adolf Cypl and his wife Julie. She experienced the disastrous Allied air raids on Pardubice during WWII as well as the persecution of the city inhabitants in relation to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, including the mass execution of people from Ležáky in Zámeček in Pardubice. Her husband was sent to do forced labour in the BMW factory in Munich. Helena was working in the company Tesla since she was sixteen years old. She has spent her entire life in Pardubice. She died on August 16, 2022.
