“We were in Sudetenland, Ostrava was in the Protectorate. We visited my uncles who studied there and lived there with one family. We and my grandmother brough them food. Richterovi, the family with whom they lived, had ration cards on everything, so we brough them food from home. I remember we had to go through customs. It was where the Svinov train station is today. Across the train station, there was a bridge, you walked across the bridge and there was another train station which is not there anymore, and there was the customs. Then we went by train to Vítkovice. From Vítkovice, which was a part of the Protectorate, we got to Ostrava.”
“When my dad came back from work, we ran into the bunker. My dad had a huge suitcase and carried my little brother who was three years old. We ran with my mother across a meadow into the bunker. At that time, they had already been shooting at us from fighter planes. And then, that was from 27th to 28th April, all hell broke loose in Poruba. The Russians had already been moving from Hrabyně where the biggest battles took place and it was shifting to Poruba. We were the first in the firing line from the Opava way.”
“I was eight. We lived in Poruba near the gamekeeper's lodge, it was almost next to the forest. There were no cellars in the houses where we lived. So we, as well as many of our neighbours, built bunkers near the forest, where a hospital laundry is today. We wanted to spend the war in those bunkers. And we did spend the war there. The bunkers were holes dug in a slope. We even had a heater there. When they started to bomb Poruba, we went there with my parents and my little brother, who was three years old. My grandmother with my grandfather and my uncles should have come as well but they did not get there because my grandfather was at work. Whereas their sons, my uncles, were in school in Ostrava so before they were able to come, the battlefront advanced to such an extent that they were not able to get there because there were heavy battles.”
"And some high-ranking officer who commanded them asked my grandmother if she could go to her apartment. Grandmother agreed to accommodate him, he did not want to be in the barn with the soldiers. Grandmother made place for him in the living room. Because she came from a farm, she had beautiful furniture from her parents, so he settled in, hung his military uniform over a chair, and slept, and at ten o'clock my grandfather came from work. My grandparents had a daughter married in the Southern Moravia and her husband was a financier. He was such a policeman at the border.Grandfather did not see the Germans in the barn and according to the uniform he thought, he was a black gentleman, my uncle was also black, he thought it was his son-in-law. So he woke him up, 'Bohuš, what are you doing here?' And he was a German. His grandfather, because he could speak German, explained to him until morning. He was an Austrian, the Austrians were forced to go to that war, and they talked all night with my grandfather. And then, unfortunately, my cousin and I found him next to our neighbors, showing his family to his grandfather, and we found him in the garden next door at my neighbors'."
"When they started bombing the Poruba, my father took a huge suitcase, my brother's hand, my mother took me and we ran to the shelter, which was about 300 meters and at that time they were already firing at us from the plane. Who was it, if the Russians , or the Germans, I can't say, I was a kid, but we actually ran among the shrapnels - but luckily nothing hit us - in that shelter, but my grandmother, because she was waiting for her younger sons, who were in Ostrava in school, they didn't have enough time to come to the bunker with their younger sons, so they stayed in our house, and then it was also terrible for us that we had... it was two houses like that, grandma's house, our house and a barn. it was over, and they bombed the barn, we saw from the shelter because it was in a hill, so we watched when the planes took off, what it actually bombed, and we saw the barn burning. Fortunately, our house didn't burn down, because the boys, my uncles, were at home and put it out."
"And then coincidentally they bombed both barracks next to us, and I remember that as there was a raid, my brother, who was three years old, hid in the kitchen under a sewing machine, we thought that we would be saved. And when they dropped the bomb on the barn, Dad was still at work, Mom was running around, she didn't know what to do, we didn't have cellars in the house, so we stayed in the apartment, and when they dropped the bomb on the barn, so what it did to us in that room was just like we were on a huge swing."
Ladislava Klásková, née Matějová, was born on July 21st 1937 in Poruba which later became a part of Ostrava. After the Munich crisis, the village was integrated into the German Sudetenland. The family lived in the grandparents’ house where they had a small farm. The father worked in the Vítkovice ironworks. Ladislava remembers the end of the World War Two, the massive bombing of Poruby on the 27th April 1945 and the liberation by the Red Army. She weathered the severest battles with her parents and three-years-old brother in a bunker build in a slope near a forest. German officers as well as later Soviet soldiers dwelled in their house. She studied to become a medical laboratory technician on a secondary medical school in Ostrava-Vítkovice. She worked in the Blood donation centre in Ostrava, which later became the Blood donation centre of the regional hospital.
