Bohuslav Eliáš

"So, they [armored men] made a clearing there. This First Lieutenant Stříž died in 14 days, so there were two victims - my father, he died almost on the spot, and this one. And it was that great-granddaughter or granddaughter who had this photograph, and Dr. Středa, after some mutual communication, got it from her. It's a completely new thing for me, and also the sight of a cheerful dad - I didn't know him like that. He was more calm and quiet in nature, emotions didn't play much of a role for him. That's how I remember him. I never saw him smile, or I don't remember him. And here I see him in such a wonderful situation, when he really rejoices with his whole life that everything is finally different. Well, in five minutes, in three minutes, everything was different. So that's a kind of memento to appreciate every moment."

"I still remember when we were in Pardubice, after my father's death, that some acquaintances of my mother came to her from the street or from somewhere and urged her to go to the railway station and go there to beat up some German, for her father's death. So, in Pardubice, when the Germans were expelled, our Czechs behaved like this."

"Full of jubilation and full of joy, without weapons, they go to take over some office or institution from the Germans, because the Germans - if it was a military administration, they never surrendered to Czech civilians, they always wanted to have soldiers as their counterpart. That's why dad was invited, with his unit, I don't know how they got together, to go and perform this, to accept the capitulation from I don't know who - I don't know these details anymore. Well, they didn't get there. Because two German armored personnel carriers stood behind the church in Pardubice. Well, when they saw this glory, they knew nothing better than to start shooting at them. Dad had a lot of gunshot wounds in his shoulder and beyond, and they ran into them. They grabbed my dad somehow by the belt, because it was the armored one, it had two wheels in the front and belts in the back, so they dragged him about 25 meters. His head was so injured that he was unable to live any longer. But, as mom always said, he bled out within an hour or so. She was still with him when he was still - in quotation marks - alive.'

“When he [my brother] emigrated and he could do the things he wanted to, we have a lot of testimonies from people who, say, have relatives there and went to visit, so we heard many times that he’d give his last penny to someone who didn’t have anything at all. [The person] had emigrated and was starting from scratch. So he’d let them stay in his place for a fortnight, until he found someone who could help them work out what steps to take next. He completely changed his approach to people, which was a big surprise to us because we saw him as a man who was strict both to himself and to others.”

“Towards the end of the war we thought we’d been liberated by the Soviet army, but that wasn’t true at all. Pardubice was basically liberated by the Vlasovites... I remember them when they passed through Pardubice to Chrudim, by the graveyard, there was a whole column of them, and because they’d been in Russia, they had Russian clothes, so we thought that they’re the Russians. We cheered that the Russians were here, but then we found out that they were captives from the Russian army who’d agreed to stay in the German army. And because the Germans didn’t have any uniforms for them, they kept their Russian ones, and we thought that they were really the Russians.”

“Dad was a reserve officer, in the end that cost him his life in Pardubice... he’d take us on street inspections, which he was responsible for in the time of the air strikes... when the Anglo-American bombers flew over Pardubice and onwards; Pardubice had to be blacked out, so they wouldn’t happen to drop bombs on Pardubice, which they managed to do anyone in early 1944... we were in Chvojenec, where Granddad had a pub, and we were coming home from the field on a heap of hay, and we saw the Americans fly up at high noon, the aeroplanes shone, and then suddenly bombs started falling on Semtín.”