Jarmila Patočková

“The school in Mukachevo was new, it was built recently. The first grade was full of pupils, but the higher the grade, the fewer children there were, because the people who moved to Mukachevo were young and therefore they had small children. Only gradually the number of children began to grow. (Only Czech children were going to this school?) Only Czech children. (The Rusyn children, for example, were not allowed to go there?) Why would they want to go there? The Rusyn children would not be able to understand Czech. But there were three or four Jewish children in our class. They told us that their parents had shops in the city and that they were sending them to this Czech school. The Jews had their own schools there, but they wanted their children to learn Czech well, because they saw the Czechs as their prospective customers. I remember that when we had classes on Saturdays, these Jewish children would just sit like that the whole morning, because they were forbidden to do anything on Saturdays. The parents sent them to school in order to avoid troubles, and the children thus went there, but they didn’t do anything at all.”

“During the first air raid we did not go anywhere. At that time I worked in the Health Insurance Company at the town square. Then there was another air raid, an alarm was sounded – there were about twelve of us working there – and the manager said to us: ‘We will go to the shelter this time.’ We said: ‘We are not going anywhere.’ We assigned to go to the brewery’s basement. He urged us: ‘You need to go there at least once so that you know where it is.’ We thus grudgingly walked there because he made us to, and as we were approaching the brewery, bombs already began falling on Zálabí. We thus rushed into the basement and it was full of people. When the siren sounded again to mark the end of the emergency, we could hear the sound of the bombs falling. Somebody said that they dropped near the waterworks building. I ran home and really, there were bomb craters near the waterworks, but the bombs dropped into a field and not on the houses where I lived with my mom and dad. On another day, we ran with mom – dad was not at home – to Štítary at night, and we carried a little suitcase where we had various things we might need, and we walked at night towards the ravine in Štítary and we stayed there until the end of the alarm was sounded. Some bombs were dropped on Zálabí that day, too.”