Helena Bystřická

"The chronicle was written in the style that - I don't know what the practice is now - that he wrote a draft, perhaps for a certain year, and that draft was submitted for approval. And only then was the chronicle rewritten cleanly. The chronicle was written by hand, the pages numbered, which means that papers cannot be torn from the chronicle, that is not possible. And in 1968, I don't know how it happened that he described the events as they happened in the village - right into that chronicle. And then in a year or two, when the communists somehow recovered from all this, they gave all the chroniclers in the district some kind of censure about what should be written in that chronicle. So, in the end it turned out that the 68th year is crossed out in the chronicle, then there is written: correction of the chronicle. And there is written what the chroniclers in the district office received, what is supposed to be written there about the 68th year. So, in those chronicles, as you are not allowed to tear the pages, it is simply the way it happened, the twenty-first of August. The way he described it is captured in that chronicle.''

"He said that there were several hundred of those bombers. That alone caused such a huge panic that most people were trampled to death after the raid. Not only those injured by the air attack, when people tried to flee to shelters. He always remembered the feeling itself. And he remembered that once it happened, that at lunchtime there was - either it was an undeclared alarm or a delayed one - they mistook the factory for a camp and bombed that camp. At lunchtime when there were a lot of young people. He said that one friend they went looking for, when they were taking the wounded and dead to a nearby forest - it was July and it was terribly hot - that's how they found their friend. He was lying there holding a bloody handkerchief over his head, so they must have taken him away alive, but then he died there. So, at lunch time they bombed that camp and he said there were about 250 dead young people. Those were the years of birth 1920 to 1924 or so. That was a huge massacre when during that funeral, before they could put people in some coffins, there was a huge smell from it all."