"As my parents visited me they went to the balconies and we talked over the glass with them. I suddenly saw my mother start to look like something... she started to put her face in such a horrified expression. And I didn't know why. But our parents said it outside on that balcony, so my dad, I'll tell you at the end like what it was, my dad went and wanted to make a complaint to the head doctor of the department to take better care of us there. There was a louse on my forehead, and it was in the hospital, so that was how my mother started to put her face in such a frightened expression, but because we children had all the lice in there, so I did not figure it out; I could not understand why my mother had such a weird expression on her face. And now my dad went to make a complaint to the head of the department. But the secretary told him, "But sir, the head doctor here is German, are you sure you want to make the complaint? It was during the war, so my dad had a hard time thinking it over. Then he said the Germans were rather accurate, and as he was already with the secretary, he asked her to announce his claim. Well, somehow he complained about it, but it turned out well, because then they started to cover our heads and consecutively clean them up."
"Well, as I lived in that house, there were semi-detached houses in that street and in the other side of the street... but it's actually just one building object. So a siren was located there. So I remember during the war especially at night, when air raids were announced, it actually resonated with our house, so I had a terrible trauma and I was always running with a terrible roar. We used to go to the cellar. At night it woke people up, that was the worst thing. It wasn't easy."
Stanislava Zástěrová was born on March 14, 1935 in Prague. She grew up in a family house in Prosek. Regarding the World War II, she most remembers the constant fear of sounding sirens and announcing air raids. Towards the end of the war, her parents sent her to see her relatives in the countryside, where she and other children welcomed the passing Red Army. Her parents and she were active members of the sports organisation named Sokol both before and after the war. She graduated from the University of Chemical Technology and has worked in the field all her life.
