Dagmar Halasová

"I remember it very, very, very, very well. Mr. Zahradníček. Because my mum took me to them once, he was already... He had a little boy, I know that he died recently, Honza Zahradníček. And then he had two little girls: Zdislávka and I think Klára. And my mum used to treat those children. And I know that once she took me with her to Mrs. Zahradníčková's, unwrapping them [babies] and examining them by touch and so on. Well, we learned that they had led him away from friends of ours, the Hloucha family. That was Dr. Hloucha and his wife. He was then a brother of the Bishop of Budějovice, who of course was imprisoned. Jan was taken away and he was put on trial. And he was sentenced to many years in prison. And I remember one terrible thing. At that time we were in Petrovice again, and it was holidays and it was summer. Some summer day when it was quiet in Petrovice. My aunt and uncle sat down outside on the bench for a while and then my aunt went to feed the hens or something. Then the phone was ringing in Petrovice. Those telephones, they had stil a hand crank. I had never answered the phone there. How old was I? I must have been in first or second grade, I can't tell you the dates. I answered the phone and they were calling from the hospital in Trebíč to ask if doctor Pojerová, my mum, was there. I said: 'Well, she isn't here, but what's going on?´ ´Mrs Zahradníčková is lying here with the children. The two of them are already dead.' And that [my mum] should come. So I said we would call her in Brno. And I went out and my uncle said: 'What's wrong with you? You're totally pale.' So I was one of the first to know what had happened there. My uncle called to Brno. My mum just…, I don't know if she went to Trebíč, but they got mushroom poisoning that time. Apparently, they mistook a toxic death cap mushroom for an edible Russula genus and ate it. And they were all poisoned, and Mrs. Zahradníčková and the little Jan recovered from it, and the two little girls died. And they let Mr. Zahradníček out of prison to go to their funeral, but they didn't tell him what it was about. And my father was waiting for him at the station in Brno, on the fifth platform, and he said that when Zahradníček got off the train, our father wanted to tell him somehow, and he apparently asked [my father]: "They're dead, Jaroušek, aren't they?" [Dad was Jaroslav]. That´s what he said. And my parents were at the funeral, and Zahradníček had to go back to prison

"On 20 November 1944, the Allies bombed Brno. My father´s great friend and family friend was visiting my father at the time. The name really means something in literature. It was the poet František Halas. And then the sirens were wailing so that all the inhabitants of houses would go down into a shelter. Everybody was running down to the shelter. My father urged that Anežka [their housekeeper], who was still cooking something, to go too. And she still wanted to finish something. And he was standing below the stairs. We lived on the third floor. I could still draw a plan of that flat. And he was standing bellow the stairs calling for her to go. And she still wouldn't go. And at that moment a bomb fell down. Dad was hurt, but not seriously, he was buried under the stairs, and Anežka was killed. My cousin found her when the sirens stopped wailing, and he ran into the burning flat, which had started to burn, apparently because somebody had left the gas running somewhere, somewhere in another flat, and found Anežka, her already charred body. You can imagine, a 15-year-old boy, what effect it had on him. And we heard about all this in Petrovice. Dad was taken to the hospital afterwards. Mum came here. They took him to the hospital in Trebíč. And Dad, when he got over it, blamed himself for causing the death of Anežka by not being strict enough with her to go down. And he said that when he was one of the last to run down to the shelter, a black-clad woman was going up against him. And this is what he used to tell my children. So they all remember what their grandpa told them. And she was always looking at Dad. No one knew her and her body was never found there. So my childhood was marked by this, by fear, and by that terrible air raid."