Eliška Onderková

“We did not heat the house at night, and so I covered myself with two duvets and I pulled them over my head, too, so that I would feel warmer. In the morning at about half past three I was woken up by some noise. Somebody was asking who lived in the house and my mom said that there was she and her daughter. I got up and I went to the kitchen to see what was happening. There were eight partisans standing there. Two of them were Czechs and the others were all Russians. Mom had some home-made bread which she baked. They were hungry and so they ate the bread and we did not have anything. My mom and I were therefore going alternately to the mill in Horní Poříčí and in Křetín in order to be able to get hold of some flour. Either wheat or rye flour for bread or a lower-grade type which was fed to the cattle. We used it to make buns. They were bitter and did not taste too good, but when there was nothing else… We would always walk to the mill at night, at eleven, so that there would be free space... We would walk for an hour and sometimes we would have to go back home empty-handed.”

“There were air raids. At night we would have to run uphill to the forest which was behind our dormitory. Or they would wake us up at night, and we had to get on a truck and they carried us somewhere where we had to sort boots, socks, stockings and other things from factories which had been bombed out and which were taken by trucks into a one huge heap in Zlín. We were sorting the things at ten o’clock at night. Or when an alarm was sounded, we had to run through the whole town to the forest behind the dormitory and they were shooting at us from airplanes. As we were running, we were stumbling over blackberry shrubs in the forest, falling down and getting up again and looking where the planes were, and running again further into the forest.”