Ing. Jiří Marel

“At the end of the war when the Russians then arrived there, our parents invited a captain of the Russian army to stay in our flat. He lived with us for two more months before they left. There were interesting things. My mom naturally cooked simple meals during the war, and we had meat only once a week or once in a fortnight. She cooked at home, and I remember that we even made our own soap or black beer at home. When the Russians arrived, one of the things that happened was that he asked my mom to give him ten eggs, and he drank them, raw as they were. He made two holes in them and he sucked them out. Of course she didn’t have so many of them, and she told him. He had another soldier as his servant. He gave him an order and after a little while the soldier brought in a basket with about sixty eggs. The same happened with cucumbers. He wanted some cucumbers, my mom obviously didn’t have them, and the soldier fetched a bag full of cucumbers.”

“There was martial law – nobody was allowed to go out. But even the Russians knew that we were coming from the train and our police was there. They accompanied us – our policemen – and we ended up in Vinohrady near Flora. There is a hotel there and we spent the night there until five in the morning – they didn’t allow us to leave earlier because there was fighting going on close to the Radio building. We spent the night at the reception. About one hundred people were sitting there at the reception and on the stairs, wherever they could. In the morning we walked past the Radio building. I saw a bus destroyed by shooting, cars smashed by tanks, a burnt tank, a house with a hole which had been probably hit by a tank. Then the Museum building, and we walked over Wenceslas Square and the Museum building had holes from shooting. We lived in Bělohorská Street, and I thus had to walk through Wenceslas Square, and then cross the bridge to Klárov and walk up Nerudova Street and I reached home in the morning (I could have walked some ten or twelve kilometres from Malešice). I immediately went to stand in a queue for bread. My father-in-law had been standing there before and I went to take turns with him.”