“It was a beautiful childhood really, except it was interrupted by the war and the various discomforts it brought with it. For one thing, there were air raids at school, we had to go to the cellar because the grammar school was at the top of Bučovice and it was an easy target to spot for the pilots. So when we were in... the fifth year I think it was, at school, we had winter holidays in the winter and we were assigned what to learn when we went to school, because there was nothing to fuel the heating with. So we would always meet up in some hall and do the tasks together. I don’t know now, I think we came got the tasks about once every fortnight, and then we had a fortnight to complete them in, because there were air raids there towards the end of the war. When we were at school, then when the air raids came, we’d hear the siren, so we’d be in the cellars of the grammar school, which were all the way down, so as soon as the siren started blaring, we had to go to those cellars. Well, and when we weren’t... when it wasn’t possible to attend school, we’d rush off to the copse, like I said, where we were kind of protected by the trees.”
“And then came the fateful year of 1938, because the Germans evicted us - it was the border region, and we had to move out in two days. Well, we only took the bare essentials, because we only had two baskets at our disposal, which had to fit everything we took with us. Because it was in September, we had to put all the winter things and bedding in. For the whole family - we lived with Grandma and Auntie. So we had two baskets for the whole family, for everything, all the things that expected we would need. Because Dad didn’t have a job yet when they deported us in those two days, they had to go to a camp in Svatobořice near Kyjov, where they were accommodated in the camp, just the two of them, it was for adults. They didn’t deport Grandma and Auntie and myself, but we were simply picked up by my aunt, my mother’s sister, and we stayed with them in Prostějov, where we lived for about three months until Dad found a place in Bučovice near Brno.”
“It was hard because we had to live in the cellar of our house, in the coal - that’s where we had the couch. And we slept there in the coal for two weeks. We slept at night, that is, and in the day we could go out into the yard because we could be outside when there weren’t any air raids. Well, but the window to the cellar was secured by this metre-long piece of wood, so that if they did drop a bomb here, it wouldn’t go straight into the cellar, at us. When the raids started, they were regularly at eleven o’clock every day, the sirens started blaring, and we had to go - there was a copse of trees there, and we always hurried off there before eleven, so we wouldn’t be in the houses but under the trees instead. But the shells even fell in our garden, where we had strawberries, and the shell blew the strawberries all the way up to our balcony.”
Zora Gallová, née Kučerová, was born on 10 January 1928 in Bílovice near Ostrava. Following the 1938 Munich Agreement, her family was deported from Bílovice to Bučovice near Brno. The witness experienced Allied air raids on Brno and nearby towns at the end of World War II. She and her family hid in the cellar both during the bombing and when the German and Russian armies passed over Bučovice. Two years after the war, in 1947, Zora Gallová married and moved to Pilsen. She and her husband started a family, although unfortunately, their first child died at birth. They later had three more children, and the witness stayed at home to look after them; she was later employed at a post office. Zora Gallová also remembers the events of 1968 and 1989. She died on March, 31st, 2019.
