Zdeněk Cvrk

"First the American fighter jets started flying there. We always - because there was no central heating in those days, right, it was heated at home in the stove, so there was a footbridge with a railing on the top of the roof by the chimneys - so when the siren went off, until then there were no bombers over Prague, only the American fighters, so we always went up on the roof and watched from the roof as the depth pilots flew into the Kbely airport. What was outside, what wasn't in the hangars, they just shot it up. And then the Germans just bulldozed it, and there was this slope next to the airfield, and there was a bunch of shot-up messerchmitts and fighters like that. It was called a burial ground. That was towards Hloubetin, under the Kbely airport."

"Then there were sirens, weren't there, and it occurs to me that one time... We were poor, we didn't have, like, a radio. Now the siren was going off and there were always a few people in the house who had radios then. So then one of them came running to us, saying that martial law had been declared, in 1942. And so we were... Because the cellars were made into air-raid shelters, yeah, and the cellars were evicted. There was a garden attached to the house, where they formed the cellars out of these canvas wooden poles, and the cellars were moved out, and the air-raid shelters were made out of that. And so he chased us down into the cellar, saying that martial law had been declared. So we were in the cellar, and suddenly two SS men burst in with machine guns, one was standing at the door pointing a machine gun at us, and the other one went to the men who were between 25 and 35 years old. He always took them by the chin. Like this. Now he just turned his head forcibly, and the SS man who was standing at the door with his machine gun pointed at us always shook his head no. And there was one lady, Vávrová, who was a widow too, and she had a son the same age as me. She was the only one who spoke German, so she told the SS men that there were only people living in that house who hadn't come from anywhere. We didn't know then that it was an assassination attempt on Heydrich."