Zdeňka Králová

“The way it was on our right side of the house, it was thanks to Mrs Soukupová, who was the caretaker of our house. She was born in Germany, and she spoke perfect German, so she started negotiating with the Germans, saying there were only mothers there, she didn’t say there were also men there, but that there were only mothers, children. Well, and my mum was pregnant, about eight months with child, so she said there was a pregnant lady there as well, so they relented and went away, they didn’t enter our part, but those others... those fifteen or so people, they shot them dead. I heard that my friend, my friend’s sister, they were to have apparently gouged her eyes out alive.”

“The next morning my dad decided - it was a risk, of course - because my mum was pregnant, I was ten years old, so he took us, and we fled the house. There weren’t houses opposite us then, just fields, and there were some garden houses built there, and gardeners. Dad just took us, and we went there, except there was no one in the house, so we sat down in the kitchen and waited it out there until 9 May. And then suddenly the people from the house appeared and told us we had a lucky scrape, that they’d seen the Germans as well, that they were coming towards them. They’d broken in... left the flat in chaos. Well, and they’d legged it into the fields. They hid in some straw, and they said they’d seen us come, but that they couldn’t shout at us because the Germans were just leaving there that very moment, as we were entering from the other side. So if it had been just a moment sooner, they’d have shot us.”