Marie Bílková

"My profound experience seeing captured Germans being led via Zlíchov after the revolution, when the war was over. They were not adults - they were children. I swear to God, they were thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds and even younger boys with their hands up, maybe thirty of them. They were walking through Zlíchov and crying. They were Germans. And our 'heroes'... I don't want to say his name. He suddenly jumped up and punched this one boy about ten years old. That image is ingrained in me, it makes me sick to think of it. That's not heroism - that's a very ugly thing to do, and ugly things happened when the war was over."

"The Amerrican prisoners of war wanted to try to escape. They were some kind of paratroopers. My dad, not being under a severe sentence, had boots. They had no boots. I heard it as a kid; my dad told it. One American prisoner asked dad for his boots because there was barbed wire. Dad gave him the boots. The escape was successful somehow... it was towards the end of the war. I recall this: after the revolution, somebody in an American uniform came to us. I know they managed to escape. And they invited our family to go to the West, saying they would take care of us there out of their gratitude for the boots. I recall our mother refused. My dad would have gone, but my mom refused to."