Svatava Chybová

"We were moving with a truck, we arrived at the house and the owner, a German woman, was still living in it, she had another German married couple there in the apartment, they were waiting to be displaced. The lady [owner] was a true German, we couldn't get along with her, the two who lived upstairs at least knew Czech, so we got along with them. Our German lady, however, had a Czech name, her name was Krásná, because she married a Czech who joined the Germans. No one in the street liked him, not even the Germans, someone even murdered him in the garden. They had a son, whom she remembered very much, she had high hopes for him. He was a gifted boy, he played the piano. He had to enlist at the front and died somewhere near Moscow or somewhere on the Russian front. When we met, she begged us that she wanted to come back, that one little room would be enough for her, that she would like to live there and that she had nowhere to go in Germany, but we never heard from her again."

"There was something like a cellar under the Sokol gym, there were a lot of people there. Who could, went to that Sokol gym. Some, like the Indráks, with whom the German was staying, had a cellar. My aunt and my grandmother were also with them. My parents, because there were a lot of us - it's very interesting, when I think about it today, I'm surprised - it wasn't a shelter, it was a hole, dug like a grave. An earthen step was made into it, so that you could go down into it, covered with a board, thrown over with a little earth, so that it could not be seen that anything was there. We survived the worst raids there." - "It was next to the Sokol gym?" - "It was next to the Sokol gym, one hundred and fifty meters from the church where the bomb fell. My mom was holding the youngest brother in her arms and wanted him to sleep, but her hands were already hurting, she needed to lay him down. She had to climb up to get the hay and the bomb fell while she was at the wall. The shock wave threw her against the wall and she remained lying there. Dad was afraid, so the grandfather went to look for her, found her there and tried to restore her to consciousness."