Vanda Špinková

"That was horrible. Imagine my mother only with us. And now there were - I don't know how many soldiers - and the main one, because we had a new house, he was banging on the door all night trying to get at my mom. That was two rooms, they were in one and we slept in the other. Me and my brother. And he was banging on the door! The horror, how scared my mum was. You can't imagine." - "The Soviets?" - "Yeah, it was the Soviets. It was something terrible and it lasted... well, it didn't last long, over a week I'm sure, I don't know exactly. But I do know it was a terrible night because he wanted to conquer it. But luckily it didn't happen, nothing happened, but we kids cried. And my mom, too. Well, it was just horrible."

"The Gestapo used to come at night. My grandmother lived across the street from the house and we lived with my mother. And when they came, she saw the car, so she came too, and we all held on and cried. They [the Gestapo] had these sticks and we had these houses so that there was a hole in the kitchen somewhere on the edge and there was a cellar. You know, there was no refrigerator, there was nothing. And there was a cellar, and they used these sticks to poke into the hole - there were potatoes or turnips or carrots, just things from the garden - and they would poke in there, and if they found one cube of butter or one bottle of drink, we would go to Auschwitz. Do you know what a horror that was?"