Ida Milotová, roz. Roučková

“We’d mostly invite them to our place, so that our parents could see them as well. We would spend most of the evenings in the company of some Americans, just sitting and chatting together. They were talking about the war, about the things they had seen. But they didn’t talk about the really bad things. They were still so full of all the cruelties they had seen, it was still so raw and unprocessed, that they couldn’t speak about it. Neither did we speak about it – it just wouldn’t cross our lips. They liked much more to talk about their lives in America, how things were there, and we would talk about our lives here. We couldn’t give them much of a treat as the most we could offer them was raspberry soda or beer. That was all we had at home. The little food we had for ourselves we couldn’t give away. But they would try to bring something with them, at least a sweet candy or a little something. We had a great time together with them. Sometimes they came with a guitar and played their cowboy music and we’d play our folk music. At other times, we played games. These were gorgeous evenings. We had guests at home almost every evening. Usually they only stayed for a short time at the place before they were reordered somewhere else again. So we only had a short time to get to know them. Some of them, we only saw once or twice and then they left again.”

“The first time we saw the American soldiers, they were crawling. They were approaching us through the gate from the direction of Wankova Street (today’s Jungmannova Street – note by the editor) and they were surveying the surrounding rooftops because the Germans hid in individual buildings and were shooting at the American troops from the dormers. I and my sister observed this from the window and we knew where they were hiding. We showed it to one of the American soldiers – we showed him which dormer it was. One of the soldiers made a gesture if he could come up to us and take a look. So we showed him the way. I went to the apartment door and opened it and let them come inside. In the sleeping room, there were three windows so each one of them took one window. They put us into the bathroom and told us not to come outside. Then they started shooting out of the window into the dormer. After a while, the shooting ceased. Then we offered them something to eat but they didn’t want anything. They just took a few sips of water and then they left again. That was our first encounter.”

"One day I came back home from the afternoon shopping. At that time you couldn't buy what you wanted immediately – you had to go to the mall several times a day before the goods you were looking for were finally supplied and you could get what you wanted. So on that day I had to go to the shop in the afternoon to get sausages that we hadn't eaten a long time. When I got back to the apartment, I saw that my husband was in his room at the desk with some officer whom I didn't know. I just waved at him through the glass door because I didn't want to disturb them, and I went straight into the kitchen to unpack the things I had bought and to do my work. After a while, I heard that they were leaving, so I went out into the hall and asked him: 'You're going out again? When are you coming back?' And he said: 'If things go well, I might be back in about ten years'."

“They Americans had their camp in the Street where we lived. They had a tank there and they would fry eggs on it. Many times we invited them to come over to our place for dinner. This is how we got to know them. One of them also asked us if he could take a bath at our place. Back then I unfortunately didn’t know that we were out of gas supply and thus he could only take a cold shower. But he was so happy anyway and he thanked me a lot for it. We would become pen pals after this. We exchanged a number of letters. His name was Kenneth Redig from Oakland near San Francisco. He was working as a teacher at high school. We wrote to each other for a number of years.“

"I counted the steps I took. My cell was tiny – it was six steps from the window to the door and six steps back. So I counted my steps. When I was somewhere around three thousand steps, I started to lose sight on my right eye and I started to get dizzy. I think at three thousand steps, I lost sight completely but I kept walking in my cell. Suddenly I fell down. I had the impression that I was near the window, in the corner. I fell down on the wall. My face hit the wall and scraped it down. I felt that the wall was rough and cold but I didn't pass out. I guess I must have fallen from exhaustion. I think it happened with the support of the tablets that they were feeding me. A doctor in a white coat but with khaki socks and khaki pants would come to my cell regularly. He gave me some pills of the size of a current aspirin pill. He came accompanied by four guards, they held me and he stuffed it into my mouth. At first I spat it out because I didn't trust them but they eventually they managed to make me swallow it because they were four guys. I think it was the pills. It was some sort of a drug that made me go blind. It totally blinded me in both eyes and I later found out that I didn't remember anything."

“They once invited me to a dinner party – I don’t remember anymore how it came about. I was hanging around somewhere in Pilsen in a typical Pilsner folk costume and some officer asked me to join them, that they were organizing a dinner party at the restaurant at Mr. Poláček. I ran home to ask mom and she told me to go. So I went to the restaurant and accompanied him. It was the first time I ate tomato soup because at home we only cooked regular soup. It was a feast for me since I hadn’t seen so much food during the war. For them, it was just the usual stuff from cans that they were used to. But for us, it was something really special. We stuffed our bellies. Then we were dancing. That officer invited me for a ball that they were organizing in the Škoda hotel. The hotel was called ‘the foreign house of Škoda’ but the Americans called it simply the ‘Skouda houtl’. It took me a while to figure out what he was actually talking about. I went there in a long evening robe. We spent the ball together and then he accompanied me home – everything was just fine. I learned how to dance various dance styles that we didn’t know here.”