Jiří Fréhar

"I know there was a new theatre being built there. The Germans were building a theater right in the backyard. It was a target building for the time being, but there was a basement, so when there were air raids, so they ran into the basement of that theater that was being built. And I remember very well when the Allied air raids were, the illuminating rockets were stunning to the children, illuminating the place they were bombing. It was quite common in that Vyškov, because it was because of that airfield that the pilots often aimed their attacks there. Well, one time I remember it was before Christmas Eve and my stepfather and I were walking home from the baker's. He bought the rolls and I carried the Christmas cake. And now there was this air raid, now we saw the rockets and the bombs were falling and the violent wind from those, suddenly a bomb fell near, so there was a violent air and it threw me into the corridor as the door was open, and I broke the sweet bread. And I remember I got slapped for that."

"It wasn't a dark time for me. I did quite a lot of sports, and what's more, my teacher, not my class teacher, chose me to go to the gym on recommendation. There was a library there and I did him a kind of library service. That was a great job, like how people wanted to borrow books there, so at the beginning I always either read the book if somebody said something nice about it, so I read beautiful books that maybe suddenly were forbidden. That's the fifties. We had to weed out some books. So we were weeding them out, but they were such nice books, so I took a few books and kept them at home. So I fed off that library, too."