Oldřich Schreiber

“In 1948, they took us away, that was the Gottwald coup, as he was at the Castle, and so on, and they took us to Wenceslas square as a youth. There were communist crowds. - What did it look like at the square? - I just want to tell you - I still have it in me until today. Those crowds. The square was full. And we were ahead of a youth because we walked from Smíchov, right. Behind us or around us were mostly the women of Žižkov - they were such a communist core here in Prague, one might say. And when the whole square thundered: 'Long live the communist party!' I was just out, you know ... All my life I have still heard it: 'Long live the communist party!' - how it thundered.”

“Now I passed by like this once and went home. And it was raining back then in May and it was quite wet. There were some Germans going on horses and so on. They were not on the main road, somehow they got there and got stuck. Now they were trying to pull themselves out, we were looking at them like that, because there was still my friend from the street, what we were doing, the work of the so-called connections. And so we just looked at it, suddenly there was a car from Světice, as we can say, stopped and started running there. I know who it was, that was Rejna the haulier, the Revolutionary Guards, the young people. And they just started looking at the Germans. The one German, what I now know about the only one, was from the radio from Liblice - Liblice radio near Český Brod. He was a technician there, but he was German. They began to inspect him and found a bag with electrical components. He was a technician, right, so he took some resistance parts and such. They beat him and shouted to 'take off his shoes!' And beat him, so we looked at it from a distance. And then they just suddenly picked them up where a young boy got there, and took them away, there was a so-called 'defeat', about fifty yards, you know, such a confined space. They took them there, we looked through the cracks and just shot them there. And I always thought, 'Damn, why shoot them! There was nothing wrong. It didn't seem to work in my head because the boy was young, about eighteen, and when he was shot, he grabbed the old man's hand. All my life, you know, I've always thought, 'Fuck, what does he have to do with it? And only after these seventy years or so did I realize a lot of things because I started asking questions. When they started asking me this at school and wanting to know things everywhere, I said, 'Look, man, what was that time - there were fifty-five Germans buried in the cemetery, I know from the gravedigger. Why were they buried there? They didn't fight there!”

"When I was the assistant in the Revolutionary Guard, there was a gentleman beside the street, a young one, who said, 'Hey, come help me pick up guns.' As he was handy and repaired a car and took the guns to Prague for the revolution. – The ones Germans discarded? What? – Yes, the discarded German ones because the Germans threw it away. There were a weapon, much stuff. And he drove the car, we drove there off the road, because the Germans would take the car. Because we had gasoline and they didn't. When they ran out of gas, they let go of the car and found another full one. Those fenders, it was full of troops, because they could not fit on the cars. And it all went to the Americans in the direction of Příbram and this part. This is where the army from Eastern Bohemia was heading.”

“I remember the army arriving in the square — the Germans. We've never seen anything like it. The armoured cars, some kind of music, some of their clarinets - I didn't know what it was all the time - so they were some whistles, I found out now. Or there were the armoured cars I was looking into - I still remember that. There it was described in Czech, that is, those were our armoured cars that took us. And so the Germans came, there was a tension between the parents and we didn't understand enough. Because the parents already knew what was going on in Germany, that the Jews would be affected and so on. So the preparations started, the Jews started preparing because they were already starting to take them to the concentration camps. So the Fišers, the whole family went to Auschwitz, that was the transport that took place in March 1943, and there is a lot of talk about it.”

“My mom came from the concentration camp, I know how I was at the gate and how I led her. The Russians took care of her - they knew it, they learned it came from the concentration camp. So I know they always gave her food and took care of us, you know, in that apartment. We lived in the basement, they lived in our rooms. - Did you have Russian soldiers at home? - Everywhere, everyone had them, not just us. We had horses in the garden. I didn't tell you: tanks first came; those left because they were looking for resistance all the time. They did not see any resistance, so they rushed on, somewhere behind the Germans, to Příbram and so on. And then came troops with horses. Those Russian troops came with horses. They were those units - I don't know - Malinovský or who they were. That was the second sequence, they were the ones I heard, the boys for execution. And when they were there, you know, as children made friends with them, when they had any they sometimes gave us a piece of candy or something - when they picked it up somewhere, they didn't have much either. They gave us food. I know they always said to my mom, 'Babushka, kushaj, kushaj.' To eat, they gave her food when they saw how she was.´”