Vlasta Skřičková

"We had that as history, so we had to tape half a page or a sentence with black tape. That was the censorship. But still, we had a wonderful professor who allowed us, even under those circumstances, he gave us so much that we didn't feel it was anything special. But then he was also arrested, he was taken right out of the school one day. He was locked up. I mean, yeah, but otherwise... We had a lot of German classes. Apart from the normal German there were German conversation classes, geography he had to learn, I mean, speak German, we did that in German, and in the school-leaving examination too, so it was another German subject. So that was a lot of Germans."

“Well, and because of that, they were always wandering, they always went somewhere in the evening and wandered around the neighborhood. Ours too, because shrapnel fell into the house next door, so we couldn't close the door, so every now and then someone appeared at our house too. My father was worried about me, so he built a ladder here. There was a small attic above the attic, so he always took the ladder in the evening and took me up there. I had mattresses there and he gave away the ladder, so I spent the night there, but it was pretty bad because some shrapnel fell somewhere nearby. It wasn't pleasant, and in the morning, they let me out again.”

"I ran like home and of course there was no public transport operating. Now, as I was walking, something was burning all around, and there were firemen. Well, there was such confusion, everyone was trying to put something out, to help. Well, the whole of Brno was simply bombed. Well, I went through the Grain Market. My grandmother lived there, they had Boromean sisters there... they had a convent there and they had one there, back then it was like the old people's home is today. There the old ladies could live in that room with their furniture and there they were. Well, my grandmother was there. I was just running through the Grain Market, and it was completely leveled to the ground, destroyed, and on fire. And when I walked by, those who didn't survive were already being taken out of the basement of the burning house. And I found my grandmother there, I recognized her clothes."

"It was in November, they raided Kounic's dormitories and all the students, it was at night, in the evening, late at night, and some of the boys were being locked in cars and taken somewhere to concentration camps. Now, the boys still in their pyjamas, I remember it like today, how they ran away from here, everyone wanted to save themselves somewhere, to get away."