"When they left, the room was pretty devastated. For one thing, the base on the table was what we left there on the first day, the tablecloth, the plates and so on. And there was a 20-centimeter layer of garbage on top of it. They were flicking off ashes onto it. It was a huge pile of everything. We had to have the parquet floor shaved later, they walked around in boots, you could reckon with that, but there was trampled in fat, it couldn't be washed. The walls were greasy up to one metre in height. We were sensible at the time and said they had passed the battlefront, but later on you could see that the culture was different."
"Among them was - and I still think about it very often because the child could still be alive - a four-year-old girl. Very fragile. Because they also handed over some keys [to the apartment], Daddy very cryptically said we would look inside the apartment. Very carefully, we didn't touch anything, of course. And this horrible memory stays with me. We peeked into the bedroom - there was a crib, traditional, with spindles, and the pillow still had a [print] from the head, some teddy bears, and a doll. And this child went to Terezin at the age of four and at six, like everybody else, to the gas chamber. Somebody said maybe on her birthday. No one of them ever came back."
"People cheered, of course. They thought they had survived the war. At that moment, I was at the window and I saw, about 70 metres away, two jeep-like cars coming down the road across the square - it was the main road towards Prague. They had 'blacks' on them, that means SS men. They jumped out and started spraying this dense gathering with automatic weapons. I flew away from the window. It was a great tragedy. People thought they survived the war, but 16 didn't. There were pools of blood in front of our house."
"In the afternoon after the air raid, my mother and I went to the cemetery, where we have a family tomb, and at the moment, Štorch-Marien is also buried there. That was also a horrible experience. It's quite close to the factories that were the main target. Next to 'Vakumka', there was also Vagonka Tatra, which was right next door. There were no precision-guided missiles then as there are today. It often depended on the wind and the ability of those in the aircraft to release the lever. And they attacked the cemetery not far from our family grave. The military graves were completely gone, there were holes a short distance behind us and bones blown up. To this day, there are still hollows in the granite on our gravestone from the shrapnel."
Zdeněk Pokorný was born on 16th June 1932 in Kolín in the family of a pharmacist. He was an only child. His maternal uncle was Otakar Štorch-Marien (1897-1974), who ran the famous publishing house Aventinum. Zdeněk started school shortly before Munich in 1938 and went to first grade wearing a gas mask. In Cologne, he experienced a total of three Allied air raids. As a boy, he witnessed a massacre in his hometown on 7th May 1945, when 16 Cologne citizens did not survive the shooting of German SS soldiers into a crowd celebrating the end of the war. After the war, his family had to accommodate Soviet officers in one of their rooms. In September 1948, he watched the funeral of Edvard Beneš on Wenceslas Square in Prague. He worked as a revolver maker at the national company Frigera Kolín for two years. Only then was he admitted to the Pedagogical University in Prague, majoring in history - geography. He lived in Kolín until 1957. Then, he was sent as a teacher to Česká Lípa, where he taught at the local grammar school for 44 years. In Česká Lípa, he met the love of his life, and he has three children. The invasion in August 1968 found him in what was then Yugoslavia. He headed the school’s Circle of Friends of Art and organised 997 meetings during the 1970s and 1980s. He founded the Civic Forum in Česká Lípa and in 1990, became its first post-Soviet mayor. He held the office from 1990 to 1997.
