Marie Frištenská

"That was before, because two days before they bombed it, it was still so quiet in the village. So people started coming out of the houses. Even my mother came out. She was unloading with the neighbours, and suddenly boom. A grenade fell over two houses from us. It shattered, twelve people were injured. My mom the most. She caught a shrapnel in her neck. She fell and broke her neck. So now what? She was bleeding. We didn't know what to do. We dragged her to the basement. She was screaming, poor thing. What a horror. We were looking for help. We found out there was a German doctor in the village. The old woman, shooting, not shooting, she flew to get the doctor. He really came. But he wouldn't go to the cellar. He wanted my mother to be taken upstairs. That was horrible, when I think about it. So they dragged her, poor thing, again. They put her on the bed in the living room. The doctor said it was broken. A disaster. They stacked big slabs. They put her leg in a splint, tied the plates to it. He treated her and then we had to wait for the war to end. If she didn't die she had to go to the hospital."

"I lived through the war, I was ten years old at forty-five. It was really horrible because the war ended between the towns of Čehovice and Pivín and we were in the town of Čehovice. Grandparents had a farm there. Two cows, goats, pigs. During the war we were in the cellar of my aunt's house, they had a little better cellar. Grandfather was in the First World War, so he knew what it was like. So he and the neighbours dug bunkers that they would all hide there, but in the end everybody stayed in the cellar. We were in the cellar too. You couldn't get out, it was horrible. The neighbors and I dug a hole. They had potatoes, milk, we gave each other food. Because grandfather had two cows, he used to milk them to get milk. But it was terrible, the Russians were already driving the Germans away, and the Germans had a radio in Chehovice, where our farm was. And they had a German tank across the house. The Russians found out, so they wanted to destroy it. That was the last glimmer."