Zdeňka Králová

“People told us that something was going on, so the whole house got together. Everyone had a cellar on the right or the left side, so everyone went to the side where they had the cellar, and we were on the righthand side, and the disaster happened on the lefthand side. Well, and they simply herded all of the people there out into the garden, where they shot them. My friend the classmate, his five-year-old sister - and their mum survived by pretending to be dead, but she didn’t come out of it easy either because she lost a leg.”

“The way it was on our right side of the house, it was thanks to Mrs Soukupová, who was the caretaker of our house. She was born in Germany, and she spoke perfect German, so she started negotiating with the Germans, saying there were only mothers there, she didn’t say there were also men there, but that there were only mothers, children. Well, and my mum was pregnant, about eight months with child, so she said there was a pregnant lady there as well, so they relented and went away, they didn’t enter our part, but those others... those fifteen or so people, they shot them dead. I heard that my friend, my friend’s sister, they were to have apparently gouged her eyes out alive.”