Bohuslav Vrána

"It was about an hour, and my mom said, 'Dad, someone's knocking on the door.' My dad said it was nothing, it was geese. And after a while again, so he went into the hallway and asked who was there. The Germans answered. Since both parents spoke perfect German, dad told them - they wanted clothes and food - so dad said, 'I'm not giving you anything, go away.' They started kicking and banging on the door, but the door was new for a fortnight. Otherwise, that one, if they leaned on it, they were right in. My parents opened the window to the garden. And they called for help, but the Mayday patrol was down at the edge of town, so they didn't hear." - "How far away was that?" - "It was far away, you couldn't hear it. So dad decided, as he was dressed in his night clothes, he jumped into the garden, and as he jumped out the window, that's when they started shooting. It was shots into the house. Me and my brother got under the bed, the house was just shaking. And my mom got the shock that they were gonna shoot my dad. So I didn't know what to do. I poured out, I didn't think about anything, and I flew to the neighbors, to where Liba Plichtová lived, because her son was also a resistance fighter and we knew that he had a gun there. But they [the Germans] apparently pulled away and the May fighters didn't arrive with the car until an hour later."

"He was working with a German at that workplace. My dad only came home once a week during the winter. He slept with some people and listened to the radio there. At work, he and another friend would talk and tell each other about it. The German overheard it, and he turned my dad in. So the Gestapo took him to Jičín, and he was there for almost a week, and they interrogated him, and he said that he didn't wish it on anybody. And they still wanted to know, because we didn't have any electricity in Popelky, and they still wanted to know where he was listening. And dad said, 'Well, I heard it on the train.'"

"On May 10, the Russian army was here in the square. Here was glory, everything! And this street that goes to Popelky, it was full of carts of German refugees with horses. And we, when we were walking home, my father and I, after the glory, we were about in the middle of the street and suddenly there was shooting. My dad turned around and he saw that somebody was shooting, so we jumped, Mr. Večernik lived here, he was a lawyer, and there was this door like a drowned in the house. So we jumped in and it was unlocked, so we hid there. When all the noise stopped, we came out. I don't wish that on anybody, there were so many dead bodies."

"We went to school here for the six years of World War II. It was complicated because then the Hitler Youth, the Hitler Youth, moved into the school. We went to school in shifts. Girls one week in the morning and the other in the afternoon, so we alternated. And we attended on Saturdays too. In 1945, when the war ended, I was finishing school."