"The worst experience I had was at night, in an anti-aircraft shelter. A terraced house in Ječná Street stood above it. It's still there. Downstairs in the laundry room, the ceiling was reinforced with struts. We took refuge there during the raid. I could feel the roar of the planes and the shaking window panes. I still hear that in my ears.”
„We lived above the track in such a small house. I was also afraid when the depth divers arrived. They swooped low over the tank train. They contained alcohol and motor oil. They also shot through the locomotive. They shot through the whole train. There was a ditch full of oil around the track. People used to go with buckets to collect the boiling alcohol from the cisterns and take it home.”
„April 1945 came, when the airmen, who were probably targeted by anti-aircraft defenses, had to get rid of their load of bombs and dropped them on the Slavs in a residential area. My parents were terribly frightened. We put my younger brother in a stroller and drove along the Úslava river and along country roads to Starý Plzenec, where I had an aunt. We were there until liberation by the American army.“
"This helmet here, I grabbed it when it fell out of the U. S. Army jeep. It is such a lightweight helmet, not the heavy steel one, but they had this sort of light helmets. They would put them on, those were made out of some lightweight material, and only in combat, they would put on the steel helmets."
"My dossier was bad because I would meet the pastors from the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren whom the regime disliked. At the end, almost all of them lost the state approval for performance of spiritual service. Which means that rather being priests, they had to find another job."
Jaroslav Kraus was born on the 21th January in 1935 in Plzeň. His father was a clerk at the City Council of the City of Plzeň, his mother was a homemaker. They lived in the Petřín suburb of Plzeň. The witness used to spend his childhood at his grandfather’s in the countryside and he helped with the harvest. In spring 1954, he witnessed the liberation of Plzeň by the U. S. army. After WWII, he attended basic school and secondary school; after having graduated from the latter, he went to the medical school, where he graduated in 1959. He got a job in the hospital in Cheb at the radiology department. In 1968, he moved to Mariánské Lázně where he became the head of the radiology ward. During the normalisation years, the State Security listed him as an enemy of the people due to his activities in the protestant church. In November 1989, he was one of the founding members of the Civic Forum in Mariánské Lázně. At the time of recording, he still worked in the City Hospital of Mariánské Lázně as the head of the radiology department.
