Ratmír Hruška

"Across the street, the Germans lived in a villa like this. Their dad was an SS man, a big one. They had them at home, I found out later... I went to school with their girls. Then it happened when the liberation was over, or should have been. They had submachine guns and a machine gun at home. We were hiding in the basement because there was bombing. Mom forgot something, got herself together and went upstairs to the room. When she appeared in the window, you could hear 'tatatata' and mom was lying on the floor flat. By accident nothing happened to her. But I was very afraid."

"We lived in a house like this, which used to be a hotel. And the Germans were clever. They painted a red cross on the roof, and in the war it was said that the red cross and the hospital would not be bombed. And they made their Hitler headquarters in that house. We they lived there with them. The German soldiers walked along the corridor, on the tiles. We threw sand under their feet to make it crunch and slide. When they flew onto the sand, they also fell, that was our kind of resistance against the Germans."