Zdeněk Štěpán

"Dad found out that many young policemen with communist ID were appearing at the police already in 1947, so he reported this to MP Neuman, who was a hostage in Terezín during the war, and we supplied their family with flour and butter , which we obtained in Čtyři Dvory. Because my father, as a traffic policeman, knew when the German military police would be on the Long Bridge, and when they weren't there, my mother and I went to Čtyrák on our bikes. There was a semi-detached house by the old Pilsen railway line, where we bought flour, butter, and milk. At that we picked grass for rabbits on a bag and brought it home. In the evening, the Neumanns came. Mrs. Neumannová and they had a daughter, Alena, and a son, Olík, and they put it in their bag at our home in Klavíkovka. That's how we supplied them, so we were quite friends with them. Dad trusted him and reported it. He wanted Neumann to let MP Horáková know. But then it turned out that Neuman had already agreed with the Communist Party that he would be a minister and he was simply betraying it, and that's why it broke on Dad. And he was fired from the police after February, right at the beginning of March."

"My friends from Klavíkovka suddenly had such nice burnt wooden turtles, legs on wires. I asked them where they got it. "Buy some bread at the Kazka place around the corner and take it to the barracks and they'll give you a turtle for it." Mom gave me the food tickets and I bought the bread. There was a bakery behind the pawn shop. Then I ran alone to Mariánské náměstí. There are bars in the ground-floor windows to this day in Husovka. And there in that window were maybe 10 hands with those turtles. I suddenly realized that I only have one loaf of bread. Into which hand to put it. I somehow solved it. What matters is the terrible difference, those clean Americans, well fed. Their supplies were everything from fruit to meat, and the Russians were in a bad shape. There, as a small child, I realized that for one side, a person has a huge value, and for the other half, a person is nothing at all."