Zdeňka Formánková

"On 21 August we immediately met in the clubroom to decide what we could do. The Soviets were distributing their leaflets and we were burning them and issuing our own leaflets. The director provided us stencil papers, and we got paper from printing companies in Prague. At that time all the people were against [occupation] and everybody tried to help somehow. So it was no problem to get something somewhere. We managed to get a shop window here in the town where we published the latest news. Not everybody was able to catch them somehow. I bought a transistor radio on that August 21, and we captured the news in shorthand and transcribed it on these flyers to keep people informed."

"On 1 January 1945, my little brother was born, and my mother always had him in a basket bellow the window, while she was cooking. They gave him the name Vladimír because they expected that peace would come soon [“mír “meaning peace, trans.]. I was looking out the window and suddenly I saw a plane, they were not fighters like today, they were such heavy bombers. I said to my mum: 'Mum, look, there's a black dot falling'. And mum said, 'You don´t say, sirens weren´t wailing, nothing´s going on.' I remember it as today, how my mother caught my brother, he was about five months old, and we fled down to the basement. There wasn´t wailing, and they were bombing. Later on I was always scared."