Václav Petr

“I have an abiding memory of it because we’d just finished a tennis tournament at the courts, and we always celebrated that with a drink. So we were drinking, and suddenly there was news that the Russians are here. It’s a horrifying memory. No one knew anything. I don’t know, perhaps I was stupid, but I went to work the next day. They’d literally occupied us, and there’s me going to work as usual. Because no one knew what was going on, there was no information. I remember it as one of the worst days of my life. It wasn’t anything that anyone could agree with.”

“During the war we moved to Srbsko, where we had a brick cottage. It had both a cellar and a first floor, a small cottage it was, ten by ten meters. Next door there was this super villa. A German organisation arrived, and the Germans took over Srbsko near Beroun. I guess they wanted to mine resources - there are two quarries there. A part of the garrison stayed with the commanders, who took up residence in one stately house - it’s by the boom gate when you go through Srbsko down from the direction of Tetín. Based on the stripes on their shoulders, you could see that those who had more stripes lodged in the villa, and the cottages were occupied by those who had less of them. We lived in the cellar, they lived above us. The interesting thing is that, while everything the Germans did was bad, the ones who lived [above us] those two, three years, they had children, they were quite normal people. If someone’d whistle, they’d have taken a gun and gone to shoot us, but otherwise they didn’t behave like they were the rulers of Europe. So it worked out, our stay there.”