Jiří Rádl

“In the war, they sent us from the fourth grade to work at the Skoda works. We experienced an air raid there. The Germans drove us to the roof to collect the inflammable bombs. These were hexagonal bars almost half a meter long filled with termit. A lot of them were unexploded so we had to take a bucket with water and put them in there.”

“The Americans were here. It was fun, we would do movie screenings in the streets, there was a lot of dancing going on. I have had a friend next door – Zdeněk Kaňků, he passed away already. His family were millionaires, they owned seven butcher shops but they were normal people. We would go play volleyball with the Americans. The MP headquarters was nearby, we would go there. One day, two of the Americans started speaking Czech to us. We looked at them perplexed. They were Czech-Americans whose grandpa moved to America but they spoke Czech at home. We made friends with them. I took them home; my grandma baked Czech cakes for them and a mushroom soup. They said: ‘We’ll go mushroom picking’. They took their jeep and went to pick mushrooms. Later, they asked us whether we’d like to go see Germany. We said we would. So they gave us American uniforms, an MP helmet, MP written on a sleeve and a gun on our side. And we drove to Nuremberg.”

“I came to the house and saw that there were planks hammered over the windows. The ground floor was occupied by Maxa, the shoemaker. It was all closed down, covered with wood planks. I was trying to release one of the planks when suddenly a window on the ground floor opened. It was Mrs. Maxová. She couldn’t believe it was me because my parents were told that I had died. She lifted up one of the planks and left me inside. I went upstairs to the second floor where we had lived. I wanted to ring the bell but it didn’t work, so I knocked on the door. The spy hole opened and closed. Then I heard the chain rumbling and my aunt saying: ‘put your arm there if it’s not a ghost’. They had thought I was dead.”

“In between houses there was an overhang and the Germans would cook there. Lots of people went to have some of that swill with them but that was embarrassing because us here, we were better off. When they saw our bread, compared to their dark one, they were very surprised. One Mark was ten Crowns and them, when they went to buy bread rolls, were surprised what a bunch they would get for one mark. They did not know butter. They were stunned by what was on offer in our stores. They were told that there was hunger and poverty here and that they were about to liberate us. And now they saw that people were actually doing well here.”

“I could have as well waited for an hour or longer. I was carrying a little bag with me where I had little tools. There was a little hammer, screwdrivers – just about everything I needed. I put that bag underneath my head and lay on the ground. I said to myself that I’ll know when they’ll drop down the bucket because there will be a loud bang. And there really was a loud bang – a very loud one indeed. I opened my eyes and the light was off. So I lit on the torch and on that moment I was terrified because as far as I could see, there were stones. The whole pit had been buried and the stone pile ended about two meters away from me. I wondered what had happened. At first, when I heard the bang, I thought that the idiots had dropped a cart. It sometimes happened. But when I saw this I knew that this was really serious because a part of the rock had collapsed and buried the section of the pit where I was. So I took that little hammer and knocked on the wall every few meters. Nothing was happening for a very long time. I have no idea how long it took because I had no watch – we prisoners didn’t have any. Then, eventually, after one knock there came a response. That’s how I found out that those who were above me knew I was buried in there. But it took almost four days before they were able to get me out of there.”

“During the interrogations, I had to sit on a chair but I was positioned the other way round. They tied my legs and arms to the chair. They wrapped a beer bottle in a towel – I don’t know if it was full or empty – and they battered my feet with that towel. I was also banged in the face a couple of times but that was nothing compared to this.”