Drahoslava Lošťáková

“We were three sisters. I was thirteen years old, Libuše was two and a half years younger than me and Boženka was even younger. Our mom made us meat loaf, bread, cakes and some biscuits. We also had a hundred crowns with us. We went to Prague and the train was free of charge. We walked the first night so I found us a hotel. Hotel Písek in Žižkov. We decided to stay there because it was quit cheap. We didn’t have to spend all of the hundred crowns. They were so excited about us being there because it was a hotel that charged by the hour. They gave us rooms with double beds. I slept with one of my sisters and the other one slept alone in her room. They even gave us a breakfast and still we had some money left. However, we spent the second night at the train station because we spent all the money we had put aside for food, on fodder for the animals in the Zoo.”

“Later, when the war was coming to a close, there was some fighting going on in the area of the Hodonín power plant. You had these small Russian airplanes that were mostly flown by women pilots dropping their little bombs on our camp. The bombs exploded and created craters where you could fit a potato sack. They thought there were Germans in the camp! At midnight on April 14, they hurriedly expelled us from the camp. Half of them had already been taken away. They took them to Planá nad Lužnicí.”

“My brother was killed in an aircraft accident. I think that hardly anybody knows about it. His wife told us about it even though she was not allowed to speak about it. He died in an airplane because of a time bomb which exploded. He was with five boys. They were on a routine patrol flight over the Bay of Biscay. By this time the war was already over. There was no more fighting going on in the skies above England. They were just patrolling the Bay of Biscay because there were ships carrying armaments from America to Russia and the young pilots were getting ready to help in Russia. They hadn’t spent enough time in the air so they were doing their training flights. When they were on a patrol flight each pilot would take four or five inexperienced pilots with him on the flight to train them. He had four or five boys on board when the airplane exploded and was torn to pieces. They all died. The only one who was later found was Franta. The fish gnawed away the flesh and they identified him only on the basis of his wristband. They buried him at the Dunfries military cemetery in Northern Scotland.” Interviewer: “What makes you think it was a time bomb?” D. L.: “They stopped all flights and found bombs in seven more airplanes. The Irish had put bombs inside the planes. They worked as auxiliary workers at that airport and there had already been a scandal before in which they were involved. The runway was covered with bright smooth asphalt that was visible from far away and even at night. And the Irish coated it with a layer of asphalt mixed with shrapnel, nails and other sharp items which made the tires of the landing airplanes burst.”

"They intercepted my brother's papers in Prague. Brother Myšák, who was in charge of the Sokol in Olomouc, Nové Sady, organized the flight of the boys from Sokol abroad. He was a police inspector and once he came to our place in his uniform for my brother's documents. He told my mom that if one day somebody came and asked about the documents, she would have to say that a policeman had taken them away. He made himself very clear that they must not say anything else and insist that they had to give the documents to the police. This saved my parents' lives in the wake of Heydrich's assassination. The Nazis caught a university student who had used my brother's papers. Myšák would use the documents of those whom he helped to flee abroad as a cover for those who needed to disappear. He worked in some store in Prague. Somebody gave him away in the course of the Nazi retaliation for Heydrich's assassination and they shot him right away. Then they came for my parents and put them both into prison. My dad was jailed in the garrisons in Olomouc. It was a military prison and the headquarters of the Gestapo. He came back home utterly devastated. They made him crawl on the corridors of the prison every day. He was all torn, his chin was grazed. They eventually let them go home. Mom came home first and dad came on the same day or the next day. But some four days later, they came for all of us."

“The concentration camp was located on the very same place where you have the theater of Bolek Polívka today. My dad was in that concentration camp. It consisted of wooden houses and the house where my dad lived still exists today. One out of every ten men who were imprisoned there went to Auschwitz. We were told by Mr. Fiala, who was a former railway worker and knew my dad. He had survived Auschwitz to tell about it. He survived because he was ordered to operate the gas chambers. He told us that our dad had been half dead by the time he arrived in Auschwitz. They had been going by cattle car to Auschwitz for three weeks. The train stopped in every other railway station to pick up more people. It took them three weeks to get from Brno to Auschwitz. My dad died shortly after they arrived in Auschwitz but Mr. Fiala didn't remember how he died. He told us that they put them in a house where they didn't receive any food. From there, they then just carried out the dead bodies."

“The headmaster of our dorms was Cleopatra who saved us from the Nazis. The Nazis herded young girls who were around 20 years old and younger to the staff room in order to be available to them. But there was the headmaster of the dorms, a beautiful woman with red hair. You haven’t seen a beauty like her in your life, not even on the TV. The Gestapo men got her. It was she who saved us from them.”