Ladislav Hladík

"The soldier who was guarding us came closer and said, 'I can see who works and who doesn´t, and who doesn´t, I write it down and they get six points and a discipline camp!'"

"The first thing the Germans did when they came here on March 17 was that they mostly accommodated here in a hotel, and so on ... they left the school aside. At the same time, those who were in the hotel went there for food. They were mostly officers, and now our people, such young people, used to go there. And they were sitting there at a table playing cards, and German officers were listening to Goebbels's speech, the propaganda minister. As they were listening, whereas it disturbed these Czech young men. So they went to turn the radio down. Of course, the officers were upset and went to him, grabbed him by the collar, led him out of the hotel in the square and kicked him in the ass ... and he ran away, and when the others, about three, saw it, they ran away too. "

"The dispatcher from Řečkovice, he was a million-dollar guy who stopped the train for us, but when I was standing by the train, I thought: If I don't get home now, maybe never. When I saw the situation there, the bombing, how the inhabitants fled from Brno before the raids ... "

"And we dug such winding alleys from the brickyard to carry the munitions from the brickyard, and as we found out, the brickyard was a warehouse full of ammunition. We were very scared of it, because when the planes flew there, the Germans were basically sitting on the cannons and aiming, but they did not fire, they were probably afraid that if they fired, they would bomb it. That would be terrible for us, because if they bombed the brickyard, no one would find us. "

"German soldiers began to appear there, not yellow-brown ones, and they wore masks. It was weird for us. They closed all the windows there, and then we learned that they were closing it and filling it with some unknown gas, that they were gassing it, leaving us lying outside for about half an hour or maybe three-quarters of an hour. Then they opened the windows, ran there in masks, and then chased us to school. Luckily, I got a room after nurses and there was already a nice bed, a blanket and so on, I had a nice one. Some got to those normal rooms. When we were there, we saw that there were 'Fleckfieber' signs on the toilet doors and everywhere, which we found out that 'Fleckfieber' was typhus. "