Libuše Janyšová

“This uncle of mine, he was arrested of course, as a member of Sokol, the local fire brigade, and the village council. He was arrested in 1944, when Hitler was already losing and started to take it out on ordinary people in the countryside, he didn’t keep to the intelligentsia any more, he took people like this as well. So [my uncle] was in Terezín, and there was an outbreak of typhus there, and lots of people died and were buried in mass graves. When I went there to ask - and I’m going to Terezín again because I need to correct there mistaken information. Because they found for me from their computer that Alois Stehlík, date of birth, from Močovice. But they claimed he had been born in Horní Počernice and that he was something else, not a farmer. They’ve got it all confused, so I’ll go there. And my uncle died there right on my birthday and the saint’s day of his son Jiří [George], 24 April 1945.”

“They did air raids here towards the end of the war, and we had so-called strafers flying in here. Those were Americans who flew in fighter planes and mostly blew up trains. I was visiting at the time, she lived on a farm in Horky, which is just a bit off from Čáslav, on the line from Čáslav to Havlíčkův Brod, the main line. They had a barn right by the railway. I was there for the mid-term holidays. And suddenly everyone started shouting: The strafers are coming. And we all stood in the yard like dolts, we gaped at them, and we reckoned we saw blacks. It’s possible, there were blacks as well and they flew low. There was a munitions train there, which they shot to bits. And instead of hiding, we just looked on. So I experienced this moment, when the strafers made a hit on the munitions train. Then sometime in the middle of the war I experienced - when I was at my aunt’s in Kolín, during the spring holidays. And my aunt lived in Vinice, and there were just fields all around and then Koramo beyond. It was called Petrolka during the war. And Petrolka was a strategic point for the Allies of course, for them to blow it up. I was there for the holidays, and my cousin Libuška was there, she was two years older. And suddenly my uncle came running up: Come have a look, something’s up! And just imagine, everyone rushed out in to the street, and you could see across the field how something fell out of each aircraft, and the whole of Petrolka was alight. Back then it was Sendražice, now it’s a part of Kolín. Those were the Americans, who took pictures of it. Those were flash bomb, and they illuminated the place, took photos of it, and then bombed it a few days or weeks later.”