Marta Kolesová

"I belong to the generation that welcomed the Red Army with great love and tears in their eyes. We were in Kladno, there were an awful lot of us there. One car after another arrived. We stood in such a circle. A small truck stopped there, there was one soldier on the back, and of course we all saluted and welcomed them, as I say, with tears in our eyes. My friend and I looked at each other, the car stopped because it had to stop, and we jumped out. The soldier gave us his hands and we jumped on that truck. It was a small, low car, and on May 9 [1945] we went to Prague in that car with the soldiers. That's my memory. Of course, there were people everywhere and they were welcoming them, Buštěhrad, Makotřásy and then Prague. It was really everywhere with a lot of love. People breathed a sigh of relief that Germany was over and that we would have a republic again. I have a great memory of that. We could also have been dead twice with that friend, because when we jumped out of the car in Prague, a German who was hiding there started shooting from above from the attic somewhere in the house. Fortunately, he missed. We continued to follow a friend who was deployed by the Germans in the so-called Todt Army [Todt Organization]. He worked there in some small factory and we went to visit him and again some German shot at us there. Then we learned that they got them from that attic. Those were the hidden ones who failed to escape at that time, on the 8th and 9th of May. So, I really remember it with great joy, and my relationship with Russia is still warm through literature and through their beautiful music, since that time, since the forty-fifth year."

“There was a curve and a small truck was coming. A soldier, around fifty, was standing on the truck. They stopped because there was an intersection, and they called: 'Girls!' Maria and I looked at each other and said: 'And I'm going!' we had a friend in Prague who was deployed by the Germans in the so-called Todt Army [Todt Organization]. It was the engineer Todt [Fritz Todt], a German, who arranged for the industrialists and young workers to be put into larger garages, where cars were repaired for the Germans and what the Germans needed. He was deployed in Todt's army and repaired cars. Marie was closer to him than I was, he was more her friend than mine. We followed him with the Russians, they stopped at Mala Strana and we jumped out of the car. Suddenly, someone started shooting at us from above, a German. Fortunately, there was a stone pillar, so we hid and so did the soldier, because they were shooting at him as well. When it stopped, we crossed the bridge and crossed the river and continued up to Vinohrady, where there was a small technical workshop. We went through the gate to the backyard, where there was a huge garage, and had him called out. A lady was watching from the window on the ground floor, we were talking with her, and suddenly they were shooting at us from above again. Maria and I could have both been dead on May 9."

"I have such experience that I went with some official who took us. My cousin moved to the border, but she wasn't greedy, she just took a basement apartment. I went to see her with an official, I don't remember his name. He had a car. His relative and I went to Kadaň. The Germans were still there, not all of them had been displaced. A German was driving with cows ahead of Kadaň, we avoided them and went down with the car. We needed to get the car out. He [the German] was reluctant that no, he couldn't. He [the official] took out his whip and started whipping him. It was very unpleasant and it offended me. Maybe he didn't understand that we wanted to help."

"I found out... I went to visit my boyfriend who was in another group. I came to them. I used to go meet him halfway when I was free. I came to them, rang the bell, and a young neighbor came to open the door and told me: 'Jirka was arrested today.' That was April 4, 1945. I went back quietly and thought to myself: 'What should I do. If he says that I collaborated...' He knew that I was in the trio because he collaborated with Karl [Pomajzl], and he knew about me. I dated him, he was my boyfriend. I wondered if he was going to name me, but apparently he didn't, but unfortunately he probably named his two colleagues because they caught them. They stuck needles under their nails. They tortured them like this, not slapping them. Or they whipped them with nettles. Twenty- or twenty-one-year-old boys... they must have said something, because quite a few of that group were arrrested."

"On the fifteenth of March, when they occupied us, I was sixteen years old. I went to school, I went to the so-called continuation school while learning, and I walked across Kladno square and there were already Germans around the town hall, maybe five hundred of them. German soldiers arrived on motorbikes, in cars. They immediately went to the town hall and collected people. They immediately led the mayor away, I was already leaving because I was crying. It was a really ugly day, it was snowing, wet snow, it was wet everywhere, it was cold, the sky was crying with us. The weather was like that all over the country. I experienced that I was crying, and I came to school, everything was mushy there too. It is interesting that the Germans had such good espionage that immediately the next day there were posters hanging and there were the names of the people they were going to pick up or had already picked up. In the following days, there were posters showing who was immediately executed. It was a difficult, very difficult time for our nation. Sad, heavy and weepy."