Ing. Jiří Kuboušek

"We were sixty-eight at the cottage. Our neighbour said, 'Hurry, hurry, go away, because the Russians have come.' We said to ourselves that this was impossible. So we took the car and we drove home hurry, hurry - with the children. Then we said what we could see here. So we came home and we saw the madhouse. There were Russians driving in the streets. Right in our street, right in our windows, it was the Hungarian army there with us, a general - a Hungarian - was pointing a machine gun at our window. The older boy [son], he was already 14 years old. He was already understood a little bit, so he was very scared. It was terrible. When you think of a boy with a machine gun pointing directly at your windows. That was just unbearable."

"The next day was the air raid on Budejice, when a lot of people died. They bombed the neighbourhood around the station and the whole station. And they also bombed the Gestapo. I was hiding in the cellar. In those days, during the war, shelters had to be set up. That's where we hid. We had a sofa there, and we sat on that sofa. We could hear the house swaying like that. That was quite difficult. Fortunately, the bomb fell about 300 metres from us. The house lost the first floor when the bomb fell. It lost the first floor and about three people died. It was a coincidence that the bomb fell 300 metres from us, otherwise we would have been dead. And my friend from school, with whom I was sitting in the classroom, died in that air raid."