Ervín Sedláček

"And it was the fourteenth of February, they were sounding the air raid. So I unlocked it all and I said, 'Americans, I'm sorry, I can't greet you today. I'm rushing down today. Today, today...' I don't know why I ran down. Well, I ran downstairs. And the workshop that we had in the basement, you could go down the staircase into the basement, or you could go into the yard, and you could go from the yard. And from that yard there were three steps and there was the first room, the first workshop, and another two or three steps and there was the second workshop. And I opened the door, and suddenly I see - in that first workshop there was a shelf, and on that shelf there were sieves, sieves, and these cake rings, and it was all in the luft! It was on its way down from that shelf, it was flying, I... I noticed it flying and then I didn't know anything, then I didn't know about myself. And I lost consciousness. The pressure that built up outside blew me down into the other workshop and I fell to the floor there. But my head fell not on the concrete, but on somebody's shoe. And the shoe cushioned the impact so I didn't break anything. I just lost consciousness for a second. But only for a second, because I could feel the foot moving and trying to take my head off. So I slowly tried to see if I was okay. But there was such an awful noise. It was a terrible noise as the bombs fell. It was horrible. And the one I dropped on his leg, he suddenly pulled out a match and he was striking and his hand was shaking like that. He was a German soldier, he was about fifty years old, and he must have experienced more air raids. Because we, who actually experienced the first air raid, were terribly surprised. But he was already totally scared, because he knew what it meant. I couldn't realize it yet at that moment."

"I was ten years old at the time. I came out of school, there was a big break, and I went to a shop near the crossroads in Běchovice to buy something. And as I walked to the shop, I suddenly saw a column of the German army coming from Horní Počernice. They were driving, and at the crossroads they turned towards Prague and continued towards Prague. I stood there like I was frozen. When I saw the elan of our soldiers, and now this, when the German army was driving towards Prague, I remembered my parents, that they didn't expect anything good from it. Well, those soldiers, they were... they seemed to me to be so intent, so alert, and they were watching what was going on around them as they rode. Everybody was holding that rifle, and there wasn't any hurrah coming out of them. No, they were fully focused and like they were waiting for something to come from somewhere. They were alert. Well, I walked into the classroom and I told my classmates. Well, they were all stunned. That was sad."

"And my dad was a total, orthodox Bolshevik. He forced my brother to get into it, he didn't get into it, he didn't get into it. So me, he didn't, he didn't get me into it either. So they set me up in a different way, he called another Bolshevik to talk me into it. So when I didn't sign, they signed me. I wasn't eighteen yet, I was far from eighteen. So I can't join the party if I'm not eighteen. I wasn't eighteen, I was about seventeen, but definitely not eighteen, I was still a long time away, many months away. They just signed me in and let it go. And then they came at me: 'Hey, you're in the party and you're not doing anything.'"

"So I come home from school one day, I threw my bag somewhere, I jumped, we had a bedroom there. I go in there, I need to get something, and I look. Mum was a ladies' dressmaker, she had this shop, haberdashery, just as a professional. And there was a sewing machine, she had a sewing machine, it was closed, it was shut, and on the sewing machine was a duplicator. And there were A4 papers, that's this, a bunch of these papers, and a little stack next to the papers that had already been turned into leaflets. Here on this road the German VH army was driving, the Germans were driving here, and on the sewing machine it said 'Death to German Fascism'. That was the inscription of the leaflet. Now I was reading it and I was like, hello God, this, this. And the Germans were able to extract from people, they tortured them, the prisoners, to get... And the Germans liquidated a lot of illegal groups like that, because the people couldn't stand it, that's why they did it in those illegal groups afterwards, because they didn't know each other. At most they knew one by a nickname, but otherwise they weren't allowed to know each other very well. And now my mother caught me seeing it: 'Jesus Christ, kid, you shouldn't have seen that!' I said, 'Well, that's nice. Of course, that was instant death, that was no fun."

"There was a big break and I went to buy something and I saw some army I didn't know coming from Horní Počernice. I knew our army, our soldiers. There was mobilization and our soldiers were riding here, the whole company - or I don't know what kind of unit it was then - on bicycles. And the village girls were like, 'Bring me an ear from Hitler!' and just all this kind of jokes around it, because it was a mobilization based on what was happening in Germany."