Ivo Houf

"Then I was coming back from Tišnov barefoot, in those shorts, to Brno, to Královo Pole, where we had a family house. And I was walking, and I rang the bell, and to see the windows, I had to step back into the street to see the windows where my parents lived. Suddenly there was a terrible clinking of glass, but terrible, and I got scared. My sister, when we didn't have broken windows during the war, she broke the two panes that were behind her, so she broke her forehead and shouted at me, 'You, God, you're alive!' She was so surprised that she broke the two window panes with her head so that she could shout at me with joy."

"One day in February, suddenly a terrible shooting. The door opened and 'Everybody out!' They chased us out, it was snowing like this. I was barefoot, I was wearing shorts and just a tank top, and we all stood by the wall with our hands up all day, because someone had shot a German soldier in that village, in Jehnice. And so all the people had to be evacuated from that village. They allowed the landowner to take a ladder, a wagon, and he could put something there and then we would leave. So then towards the evening we all went, just like we were, me barefoot and in shorts, all the way to Tišnov. That's a long way, that's many kilometres!"