Jaromíra Jarošová

"... there was some noise of the plane and now I heard it firing. They had a machine gun and now the machine gun... So I just didn't know. I thought, well, what the hell. I was walking down the road from the school, so I got in the ditch, I lay down, luckily there was high grass, so I couldn´t be seen much. And he flew over and was shooting and luckily he didn't hit me."

"And it happened that our family in that village, in Poloma, was denounced. And they reported them to the Germans that this was happening there, and of course they brought my grandfather and my one uncle and my other uncle... were taken away by the Germans. Unfortunately, then it was learned that the one who turned them in was the parish priest in the next village. And now when this happened, of course the youngest brother [of my mother], they beat him to death during the interrogations, he didn't even get to that concentration camp, to Terezín.... they took them to Terezín... he didn't get there at all because they had killed him before. And my mother's older brother, he just... they took him and my daddy too, my mother's daddy, my grandfather. Well, they were in Terezín, my grandfather even has, like the tombstones there - that was František Urban - well, he just has the name there, who all died there. But my mother's older brother, the younger one, he didn't live to see it, so he was there in that concentration camp, but somehow he managed to escape. We don't know, I don't know to this day, maybe they told me, but I don't remember, I'd make it up, but he managed to escape, so he got among the partisans and again he was some kind of a liaison, he survived like that until the end of the war."

"And it was in that village [Polom] in those deep forests that the partisans landed during the war. And that family of ours, that is, my grandfather and my two brothers [uncles], stayed there afterwards, it was during the beginning of the war. And they helped the partisans... they brought them food, they brought them clothes, and again the partisans gave them messages, which they were sending on to other partisans. And these were the kind of units, what they called, the secret ones. And that's how it all spread on."

"On that Palm Sunday, of all days, it was a big raid. And we went down [to the basement] with my mother [and brother] and suddenly a huge bang. Mum always covered us with a blanket because it was a terrible noise as it was exploding, the bombs. And when she just... she covered us with the blanket so we wouldn't hear it. And more than once there was a terrible bang, and we knew it must have fallen somewhere closer. And it did. We had a kindergarten 200 metres away where the kids went, that's where the bomb just fell, in that kindergarten. Luckily, it was a Sunday, and nobody was there. That was very fortunate, because otherwise it would have just been catastrophic. But our house, not our house, but where we were living... of course, the windows were... the pressure wave blew them out, and some kind of shrapnel from the bomb, or whatever it was, went through the roof and just where my bed was."