Lubomír Schimmer

"We used to go to my grandfather's pub a lot. He had it in Holešovice near the Holešovice power station. The four big chimneys are such a sign. The Allies bombed that again. In front of the pub was a little plaza. And the power station was about a hundred metres from the pub, or the pub was a hundred metres from the power station. One day we came from Prague like this, [as] they said, we got off at the power station and suddenly the sirens started blaring. My mother said: 'Should we run the hundred meters, should we run...? We'd better not...' We hid in a side street in this building and ten seconds later a bomb landed right in the middle of that patch. If we'd run, we'd have got it first hand. Or I'd be sitting in the pub like this by the kitchen window, painting something, and suddenly it'd go off. The window blew out, I got a cut on my head. War wounds... It got so dark. Grandma got scared, fell over the watering can, broke her ribs. Then we went to the cellar, but it was too late. Grandpa had pulled down the blind once before the air raid, I didn't see that... But the bomb hit the plaza and he had the blind wound up on the tap. The shrapnel cut through his new electric tap. They had ice taps back then, he had one of the first electric taps in Prague. The shard flew through the shutter and put a terrible hole in his refrigeration counter."

"The only memories I have of my pre-school years, apart from a few little things, are of air raids, machine gun fire, bombings and so on. First of all, when we lived just down the road from the dorms, that was the line from Prague to the north... There was a chemical plant in Kralupy and the Allies bombed it, and because it was 1944 and they still had some planes in the spring, there were air battles. These planes were flying over our house, shooting at each other, bullets were flying in all directions, [it was] a terrible roar. They were dropping tanks, about a meter big, it looked like an egg. And whoever saw the movie "The Barefoot Stubble," the tank played a role there too, but it was from a bomber, about four hundred liters, these were only one hundred liters. But the guys, after it was over, they ran out there and sucked the gas out of it too. There was about four litres of petrol in each one. Nobody could imagine what four litres of petrol was at the end of the war. There were also discarded bullets, belts of bullets. These were our toys - machine gun belts, a metre and a half long, full of machine gun shells. That's what we played with as kids. We were playing football, suddenly it started flying, we ran into the woods, and when it stopped, we came back. When the fights were going on, my dad was watching from the window, but we had to crawl up against a wall. And we'd say, 'If we get shot, we'll be all right here.' And Mum once said, 'We'd better go over there to the rocks.' There was this rock overhang. 'We'll hide there. What if it hits the house, maybe it'll fall and burn.' So we ran there and hid there. And when [it started], my mom covered me and my brother and prayed out loud. And one time it was banging like that again, and my mother said, 'We better not go there again, maybe we won't make it.' Because you never knew when you were going to catch one of those bullets, because there were an awful lot of shots flying in all directions. So we didn't get there. The next day we went [there] to see as part of some play, and we saw how the rocks were shattered from the bullets. If we had gone there, we probably wouldn't have survived."