Jiří Jurka

"I remember one more thing, the air raids. Brno was hit by a big air raid on 20 November, it was a really big and terrible air raid. I was in Borotín at that auntie's place then, and I remember the the bomber planes flying over. That was such a sound: vzzzzzzz and that was every other day, those planes flew over us there. The Americans were already doing whatever they wanted in our airspace at that time. The Germans, the Luftwaffe too. When the Battle of London was fought, where they really had the upper hand, it was horrible. And then the Americans retaliated against them so much that I think that Dresden, for example, needn´t have been destroyed so much. Although on the other hand I think that morally it was necessary to break their pseudo-moral, it wasn't moral, it was perverted enthusiasm."

"On the morning of the fifteenth of March we got up. Dad was waking us up and said, 'The Germans are here.' We lived at 55 Střední Street, I have to get back to that. We moved there from that Kuldová, as I said I was born on Kuldová Street, when I was six months old. There was a new house built there, a big block of flats, built by Mr. Hanák, the architect. Mr. Hanák, the architect, was either really playful or he made a bet with somebody. He built a house that had three entrances, stretching then from Dlouhá Street, now Staňkova Street, to Střední Street. It had three entrances and mind you, it had a hundred exactly the same flats, it had no extension anywhere, it had no attic anywhere, no. That house had a flat roof, that house was a flat cube and there were a hundred identical flats in that house. It must have been something terrible for the architect. Mostly Czechs lived in our house. We knew that there were some Chládeks living on the ground floor, who we knew were from Vienna. But our neighbours in the corridor, the Hauri family, we hadn´t known they were Germans all the time. The fifteenth of March came, there was a dusting of snow outside, and we looked out of the window on Střední Street, and we could see Větřní Street and Dlouhá Street. And we were absolutely amazed at how many windows had swastika flags in them."