Eliška Dusilová

“Whenever a door bell rang in the evening, my mother was always frightened. Just beside the children’s room my father had a radio near which he sat all the time, listening to the news. ‘Boom, boom, boom,’ this was the sound of the London radio. I remember being curious about what they said there. ‘There’s a rose in the blacksmith’s forge.’ These were sentences that did not make sense to me. Probably these were codes on which they acted.”

“It was in my father’s study. He had his fountain pen there. It was probably expensive, because one of the Gestapo men took it and hid it in his pocket. When they left I realised that they stole things from people. My mother had some jewels – my grandfather was a jeweller – so I took the jewels, put them in a suitcase and despite the ban on us leaving the house I took them into my schoolmate’s family.”

“Suddenly there was a man running. It was not allowed to ride a bike across the park and there was this woman walking, leading her bike by her side. He wrenched the bike from her, jumped on it and cycled away. Then we heard whistles and stomping of boots. Suddenly there were many soldiers and civilians. They started shooting at him. He returned the fire. Then threw the bike away. We ran after him as he was running into Smil’s street, where we lived. The Haks, with whom he hid, lived there too. He tried the handles of doors, hoping he would escape through the back garden. At the corner of Smil’s street, just in front of Mr Šnorfajl’s store, he just fell. They ran up to him and took his bag from him. They stopped us, saying we couldn’t go any further. But we said that we lived there and they let us go.”

“Pardubice was a transport junction. Many Germans who were fleeing were passing through Pardubice, as well as many people who were returning from concentration camps. I was already fourteen years old and we applied to help together with other girls. I saw suffering. People were dying there. There were some women who were qualified nurses, and I could not understand this: German women were fleeing, they had their infants and they were deciding whether to give milk to these babies or not. I could not understand how it was possible that children who could not be blamed for anything were to suffer for what their grandfathers or fathers had done… I also saw people stealing things there, because people were bringing food there. I can tell you, I don’t think of people too well.”

“Father was calling on his patients. Sometimes I went with him. Sometimes he would get out of the car in the middle of nowhere, far away from any civilized place, and walk somewhere. I think there was some dead letter box there. I found it strange. He was also sending some signals. The recipient was probably one of the resistance fighters who lived in a place which was visible through our garden, and dad would signal by turning lights off and on. This seemed strange to me, of course. And then, later, young men were coming to his consulting room every Saturday. Saturday was the day when our parents were arrested. I don’t remember how many of them, but there were at least three of them. They were coming to him without any children. Always to the room where the X-ray machine was. Then they were saying that the transmitter was to be placed there after the transmitter Libuše had become unusable. But I didn’t know about this, I learnt it from television from the History programme that my father had been an amateur radio operator. I didn’t know about it. He supposedly repaired the transmitter for them. I also learnt that he knew shorthand writing; I didn’t know about this either. I learnt about it from television.”

“When they arrested our parents and sealed the house, they kicked me and my brother out to the street. What is interesting is that they jumped into our house through the window in the morning. We had a maid, and she had her small room downstairs, and she kept the window open as she was airing the room. They jumped in there through that window. It was on Saturday. One of those young men, I don’t know who he was, I could never find out who he was even when we discussed it with other people, because the paratroopers in Resslova Street were already dead at that time. He may have been Potůček, he was the one who survived for the longest time, I don’t know. Well, he rang the bell on our door. If some of the SS men had been there, well, they would have gotten them all.”