Mgr. Azra Drozdek

"I remember one experience when one of our neighbours - she was baking such an awfully good chocolate cake. I liked it very much from her and she baked some. Then there was just this alarm, so we all went into the cellar and I, as a little child, a little bit like that, not understanding what was going on, somehow heard that she had baked the cake, and I really wanted the bun. But it was on the fourth or fifth floor, where they lived. I remember that she was (or is, she is still alive) such a determined woman who was not afraid of anything. So she said, 'And I'm going to get her the cake,' and she did go up to that fifth floor and, despite some risks of the worst happening, she brought it down to that basement, where I then enjoyed a chocolate cake while the attack was going on around me."

"The memory, which was also described in my mother's notes, was that we got to a checkpoint where there were soldiers. Mom told me to get up (because I was sitting in the double seat with her, with my sister), to immediately move over to my dad, who was sitting a few seats away, a few seats ahead of us, and to sit on top of him to cover him. It was in those memories of hers that the reason she told me that was so that I would cling more to dad, so that I would hug him, and so that the soldier would take pity on my father and let him go, because it looked like... it might have looked like - I guess she got what she wanted, then, it probably looked like - that I, as a small child, had only him. So because of that, we managed to get through this checkpoint where they dragged a few men off the bus and actually dragged them into the fighting on some side, or if they captured them, I don't know. But my father and another neighbor who was very sick managed to get over that barrier together with those women and children. And that was in her memoirs, among other things, too. I remember just clinging to that dad like that to cover his head, that I remember covering his head like that. And then she filled me in on the reasons why she said that."