Věra Trechová

“We were shouting at him to hurry, because the sirens already sounded the alarm, but he was not too scared by it, because he was already used to it from Germany and Vienna. He just called back at my brother-in-law: ‘I’m coming, I’ll just change my shoes.’ My brother-in-law ran out of the house, and at that moment it exploded. A bomb hit the house. It was a U-shaped building, and they were in the basement on the other side and thus they saved themselves, and he already knew that it exploded there. They were not able to get out of the basement, because it was all covered with debris, but fortunately the basements were not completely covered because people did not know where it would explode, and so they managed to get out of the basement from the other side. My mom was four months pregnant, and she held my three and a half-year-old brother’s hand, and my grandma held the baby which was six and a half weeks old. They managed to get out from the debris and leave the basement. Nobody helped them, nobody was there, and they were then searching for him in hospitals because mom could not believe that he had stayed inside the house. She thought that he had escaped as well, but then they came across some old man who had the same name, and they thus realized that there was no hope anymore.”

“In the cottage in the forests it was not that bad... but for the people who stayed in the city it was worse… Then the air raids on Brno began and sirens sounded an alarm, but we had our shelter in the village Soběšice, which was far away, and the bombing was usually over before we managed to run there. We had to run there, and it was terrible, but we survived… Our house in Brno was destroyed by the bombing.”