Zdeňka Králová

“The next morning my dad decided - it was a risk, of course - because my mum was pregnant, I was ten years old, so he took us, and we fled the house. There weren’t houses opposite us then, just fields, and there were some garden houses built there, and gardeners. Dad just took us, and we went there, except there was no one in the house, so we sat down in the kitchen and waited it out there until 9 May. And then suddenly the people from the house appeared and told us we had a lucky scrape, that they’d seen the Germans as well, that they were coming towards them. They’d broken in... left the flat in chaos. Well, and they’d legged it into the fields. They hid in some straw, and they said they’d seen us come, but that they couldn’t shout at us because the Germans were just leaving there that very moment, as we were entering from the other side. So if it had been just a moment sooner, they’d have shot us.”

“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.”