"We were really in the basement at the end of the war. At that time, it was clear that the queue would cross us, so my father decided to prepare the only cellar room that was in the family house at the time to cross the queue. So, the only window in there, he barricaded a box of sand, installed a series of columns to support the ceiling, and created two bunk beds that we could lie on. And then, of course, we brought the supplies we had to survive. We did not spend too much time in the cellar."
"I have such a personal memory from the end of the war. It was April 18, 1945. Then my father, I was surprised, said, 'Let's go for a walk.' He didn't have much time. As a carpenter at home, he often made furniture and the like, but then for some reason he invited me to do so and we went for a walk to Ostravice. When we came to the Vratimov bridge, which was then also demolished during the liberation, you can get the photo, or it is published in the History of Hrabová, so we heard two detonations. Gradually we then returned home - about an hour later - and we were surprised that a group of neighbors was standing in front of our fence, there were also members of the German army, and we found out that one of the explosions actually took place in our garden. The officers and the Soviet fighter chased the car, and from the road, which was called the highway, it was a checkered road leading to Místek, turning toward our houses and trying to hide there. The bomber saw a car disappearing, so it dropped two bombs. One of them fell down in our garden, but a large pile of manure had just been brought there. The bomb fell into this manure, and so its effects were not so dramatic, though a large shard nearly killed my mother, who was standing in the window. The chimney was damaged, the plaster was damaged and manure was scattered in the gardens of all nearby houses. Unfortunately, the second explosion had very tragic consequences. It happened a little further, about 500 meters, at the monument to the guard Janhuba, who was murdered there many years ago, and unfortunately the bomb killed five people and a small child there."
"Especially towards the end of the war, the raids increased. I remember the big raid on Ostrava at the end of August, when the aircrafts flew just over Hrabová and headed for the Vítkovice ironworks, where many bombs were dropped, and as you know, there were a lot of deaths then, in our vicinity, roughly where Makro stands today, small brick kilns were built in which German soldiers tried to melt some material that was well flammable and from which there was a lot of smoke - probably a kind of tar or something like that - and they tried to keep the whole area under smoke so that they would not see the planes. In Mitrovice towards Místek was an artilery unit and they were shooting at them a lot.“
Lumír Dokoupil was born on August 25, 1935. He spent his childhood in a family house in Hrabová, a village that became part of larger Ostrava in 1941. Lumír’s father Jaroslav came from Drahanská vrchovina, during the war he worked in Vítkovice ironworks, mother Ludmila, née Benešová, was a seamstress. Lumír also went to primary school in Hrabová. After the war, in 1946, he began attending a real grammar school in Přívoz, after the school reform he was forced to transfer to a secondary school and in the years 1950 - 1954 he studied at a pedagogical grammar school in Ostrava. After graduation, he finished studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Education in Olomouc, majoring in Czech language - history. In 1958 to 1962 he worked as a high school professor at the eleven grade school in Hlučín. Since 1962 he worked at the Department of History at the Faculty of Education in Ostrava. He became an expert in historical demography and social and economic history. In 1966 he defended his postgraduate studies (CSc.); in 1983 he was appointed associate professor for the field of Czechoslovak history. After November 1989, he significantly contributed to the formation of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava. In 1993 he was appointed professor of Czech and Czechoslovak history with a focus on economic and social history. He still works at the Center for Economic and Social History of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava (2020).
