Kurt Schmidt

"When I arrived there, I never went straight into the interrogation room, but I sat for an hour or so on a wooden bench that was opposite the window of the reception, but behind the separate door in the State Security area. I was sitting there until finally someone decided that I should move on. It was endlessly repeating the same thing over and over again there, as if they were testing my memory to see how many things I would say the same way for the fifth time, or how many things I would say differently. Somehow they wanted to catch and justify the untrustworthiness of what I was saying."

"Our soldiers had not yet arrived. The German army was retreating. The retreat, it seemed at first that some troops were retreating. So there were some motorized units retreating, they consisted of a few cars, but apart from that a large number of motorcyclists. So soldiers on motorcycles, they were riding on these motorcycles in double file, and they were crossing the whole square, and it was making a terrible racket and rattle. When these motorized troops, or soldiers, had passed through Vsetín, there came terror and dismay because suddenly cattle appeared, unmilked cows, which were spraying milk on the road. Behind them there were the normal manure wagons pulled by cows, with various wounded and disabled soldiers riding on them, who could no longer walk a kilometre on their own. On those wagons was sitting, for example, a tailor with an ancient sewing machine that the army had confiscated or stolen somewhere, repairing torn uniforms."

"I know it was sometime in the autumn. So when I compare the time details, I think it was in the autumn of the thirty-ninth year, when the synagogue was blown up totally. It was already after dark, and we ran out of our cottage into the yard first, then up the road, where all the other inhabitants of the semi-detached houses were also staying with us. All of them terribly shaken, frightened. There were at least twenty detonations, at intervals, another one, another one, another one. The materials from the synagogue flew to our garden and many of them landed on our roof. I know that the roof was being repaired afterwards, that there were chipped tiles, from the brick fragments that had flown down from the synagogue. Afterwards, when my mother and I left the street, we somehow said goodbye to the neighbours and there were no more explosions. We were all absolutely shaken by it. All the people in the neighborhood were afraid of what would happen next. That was the biggest question. What will happen next?"