Bohumil Hajný

"All Germans were here, we lived with them. The kitchen used to be here, the bedroom was here, and in the attic there was a small room, and I lived there with my partner, and our parents here, the Germans lived in the hallway. The housewife stayed here, he [her husband] was captured in Russia. They had three children. The oldest was twelve, the boy was ten, and I've forgotten what was the little girl´s name, she was seven. In July we came here and somehow at the end of August members of the National Security Corps (SNB) came, first the new chairman of the National Committee came with an interpreter and told them that their property had been confiscated. Here he read it to them in the kitchen. Of course they started crying that they hadn't done anything. It was touching. When the expulsion was to take place, on the eve of the deportation, the SNB men, policemen, came and told them to get ready, that in the morning wagons would come, that local people who had horses would take them to Lovosice for deportation. There were a lot of Germans here, so-called national guests. They were escaping from the Polish border area, arriving in wagons. They were chased out at once, I remember they were walking in a procession. But here it was the case that many [Germans] stayed here and people had to stay with them until the second expulsion. Those who could do something and were workers and worked in the farmhouse, they were here until the next spring. There were about fifteen families left. My mother was born in Teplice, in the Sudetenland, so she knew German perfectly, so that was an advantage. So she was speaking to them. I don't like to talk about it, because somehow I didn't like it very much. They said straight away that they weren't to be blamed for anything, but I don't know how they had behaved here. So I didn't talk to them, I was quiet. I hitched up the oxen in the morning and went out to harrow."

"All of a sudden sirene wailing started to signal the air raid, they were always signalling for people to prepare, that they were over German territory, the so-called pre-alarm. Now they started to signal the alarm straight away, and we could hear them [airplanes] flying and rumbling. The lights were turned off that time, the electricity went off, it was dark. Planes started flying and dropping little parachutes with lights. The raid started, they lit it [the city] up. We were already about 50 meters from their quarters, the Germans had concrete bunkers there for the railway station staff to have somewhere to hide. They said it was for two people. It was a concrete egg, about two meters high, 1.2 metres in diameter, half of it in the ground. There was a sixty-by-sixty [centimetres] concrete door. There was nobody there when we got to it, so I said we'll hide in there. Suddenly two Germans came and called out that it was only for two, that they wouldn't let us in. They were two railway men. I was young, I didn't ask them anything, and I pushed Katya in there, she nearly rolled in there bottom first, and I got in there too. They [railway men] got in there too, and they were swearing. Four of us squeezed in there, and during the second raid, a girl joined us and we ran there out of the camp and five of us squeezed in there. Next to it had been a heating house, it was flattened. There had been two locomotives there, they were damaged. The bombs were falling not far from us, about ten metres away. It took about 20 minutes or half an hour. When we came out, everything was on fire, the whole station. They were throwing phosphorus bombs, they were burning easily. The rails were bent up high, I said maybe the rails had been on fire too. After about an hour the sirenes were wailing again, Katya said we'll go to the bunker again. That took about half an hour too, and they were bombing the Main Station and a bit of Neustadt, New Town. That was about two o'clock a.m., in short, it was after midnight."