Jarmila Skuhrová

"Then, on 17 April [1945], they bombed not only the railways station but the whole Jateční Street, where Kovošrot is today. From the slaughterhouse all the way to the house, which is now boarded up. It's the only one left standing. It's still standing, boarded up, closed. It was all broken. In that hillside that sloped down to the Mže River, there was the entrance to the shelter, that's where they ran for cover when the air raid was signalled, from the rails, from that freight station. And imagine the law of coincidence, the bomb went straight into the door of that shelter. That was one big massacre. After the war was over, Daddy came - he rode his bicycle, because nothing else would go, it was all bomb holes in the road - he rode his bicycle to the Škoda factory through the Rouden meadows. He came home and said: 'The bank by the Mže is full of ordinary wooden coffins, they load them there, they nail someone into each one and that's the end of it.' Well, I heard it and I wanted to see it. So I picked myself up and ran over there. It was unimaginable smell and flies and everything, I had to run away again. It was such - literally, they were loading human remains with pitchforks into these bare coffins, into these boxes, there was nothing else they could do."