"For examole before lunch, they'd wail to say there was an air raid. We went to the shelter, there were beautiful vaulted cellars in our house, but it was very cold. We had benches and we sat there for maybe an hour before they wailed that the air raid is over and we went home. Then in the afternoon the raid could be repeated, often several times a day. There was a house on the corner that was completely ransacked after the air raid. Everybody died there, children and parents. Neighbours said that their bodies were picked up in pieces. The people were badly torn."
"When my future husband and I said, well, we could go to the cinema. But there were only war movies! It was only dead bodies, only shooting, a poetic movie, there wasn’t any. And they were German, dubbed into Czech, right. Dancing was forbidden because it was said that German soldiers were dying for us at the front and we were going to dance? That was forbidden, wasn't it. So, there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. Nothing, nothing at all. It was so crushed, wasn't it."
"What a glory. We lived near the county courthouse and there was a big garden in front. There they welcomed Heydrich. Six cars came, Heydrich came out, he was a big, well-built man. He was Nazi saluting, that was his belief. But he had a very pretty lady, very small, and two boys. They were blond and pretty close in age. Well, then they killed him."
"Just as we were staying with my parents near the courthouse, the planes came in. They made a raid on the Škoda factory, but I guess they miscalculated and instead of the Škoda factory they dropped bombs where we were living. We were very lucky because the bomb fell on the dirt in the garden and didn't explode. That was the only thing that saved us. Then the bomb squad came and defused it. But otherwise it was active."
Jindřiška Kolocová was born on 15 December 1924 in Mladá Boleslav. In the summer of 1938, she went to Hodkovice nad Mohelkou and stayed with a German family for two months. It was then that she became friends with Konrad Henlein’s niece Hana. In 1940, she entered the public trade school in Mladá Boleslav and after graduating two years later she got a job as an accountant in a wooden toy factory. When she was threatened with forced labour to Germany in 1944 to clear debris after air raids, she decided to marry Jaroslav Koloc in October 1944. At the end of the war, she witnessed the daily bombing of Mladá Boleslav by Allied planes, but her family survived unscathed. Life after the war was made easier for the Koloc family by the fact that they were not interested in politics. In 1952, the couple had a son, Jaroslav, and Jindřiška Kolocová later worked as an accountant at the Pramen grocery store. She worked there until 1980, when she retired. At the time of recording (2023) she lived in Huť near Jablonec nad Nisou.
