Štěpán Böhm

“My father was not a soldier. Yet, in ’43, he had to join [the Wehrmacht] as a telephone operator. At first, he was somewhere in the Alps, he told me. He ended up in Russian captivity. He was educated and knew what to do. There was an air raid, and he knew where some live wires were. He soaked the blankets, threw them over the wires and shorted them out. Then they ran away during the raid. Then he was in American captivity and they would pull dead bodies out of the sea. I know he even gave his wedding ring for a piece of bread, to have something to eat. Then he voluntarily went into Russian captivity again because he wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia. They assigned him to Znojmo and he had to wait for verification. It took several months; I know we went to visit him. Was it three months or so? When they released him, he went to work as an electrician with a firm immediately.”

“I remember the bombing started towards the end of the war, primarily the train station in Znojmo. There were freight trains with tanks and combat equipment for military forces that were retreating almost to Slovakia – that’s what the air raids targeted. The bombing was so imprecise that we had to sleep in our neighbours’ cellar for several days in Tasovice. I remember my mother telling me: ‘Stay close to the wall – the bullets won’t not hit you that way.’ We crawled along the wall, I recall. There was an air raid in Znojmo – the sirens went on – as we were walking. There was no other way but to hide in a bunker under the train station. When the raid was over, we found that a half of the station was levelled. They said almost 300 people hidden there had died. We were in the other half of the station and were lucky to survive. I’ve been through that, and it was not nice for sure.”