Ing. Marie Krebsová

"Today is exactly three months ago. On June 24, it struck. How was it? My husband and I always watched the Slovak news on TA3 at 6.30pm, switched to CT1 at 7pm and then we switched to Nova to keep ourselves informed. I was already lying down. And all of a sudden, I don't even know if it was as soon as the Slovak news started, it must have been, because the power went out a moment later. And in the village it's like when the electricity goes out, every farmer goes to the front door to see if the neighbour's light is on. So my husband went out to see if there was a light on somewhere, and he came back a moment later and brought hail like a hen's egg on the palm of his hand. I said: 'What are you carrying?' He said: 'Mum, look what's falling.' I said: 'Grandpa, take it outside quickly!' It was dark... it was still dark. But we already had the window blinds down, because my husband used to do it regularly, and six o'clock had fallen, and our window blinds were down. So he went to throw it out and there was this awful silence, this heaviness. I called out to him, 'Grandpa, Grandpa, hurry, come here, I'm scared.' So he came to me and we sat together on the couch. And after a while there were terrible noises and the house started shaking because we had an iron metal pole built in the house for electricity. There was a radio, light, everything. And it was normally rocking the house. And terrible noises. And I thought it was just us. Because about a week before, it had pulled down two roots of the decorative plant of Parthenocissus tricuspidata or how is it called in my yard. I thought for that first moment that something was just happening to us. And when it... horrible rumbles, I don't even remember everything, exactly what happened. We were just shaking terribly, and when it started to get quiet, you could see through the blind that it wasn't completely dark outside. So I said, 'Grandpa, pull up the blind a little bit, let's see outside.' And he pulled it up a little bit and there was a pile of bricks, wood, metal, slates, right up to our windows in front of our house. Because there's a road and straight to our house, there's no front garden. It was a terrible mess. And I look and I say, 'Grandpa, look, I think that's our roof.' And he says, 'Yes, Mum.'"

"Well, one day they found out that there was a telephone, so my father went to the telephone, there were no cell phones then, not even a regular phone in the neighbourhood, we had to use the phone in one cottage, and a mutual friend of theirs from Moravská Nová Ves called, his name was Mr Michalica. He was a great friend of theirs, and he said, 'Eda, please, can you come, we're going to Modra, Slovakia, to get some wine.’ Even my mother said, Edo, go please, you cannot do that to him, I will finish your work in the bakery. And so my father went and never came back. It was arranged somehow, I don't know-how, it was never talked about at home, but somewhere on the way they were waiting for them. The man my father didn't know got twenty-five years, Mr. Michalica got eighteen, and Eda Smékal got eleven as a warning. And all was confiscated by the state, which was his property. Fortunately, the bakery was still in my grandfather's name. But everything else, the wine cellar, the materials for the cottage with a large plot of land on Radejov, the car, the truck that was used to deliver the baked goods, all was confiscated by the state. I remember they even took the clothes when they came. And he was in pre-trial detention in Brno for a year, and after a year, when the trial was over, he didn't see that my mother was in that room, there were several of them, those prisoners. But actually she was the one who said that he recognized her by the fact that she coughed. She coughed so strangely that he recognized her by that. First they offered her a divorce. Of course she didn't accept. And so he was sentenced to eleven years in Jáchymov prison."