Jarmila Pavlíčková

"I was born into wartime, so those six years were actually a war. So I also lived through some of those moments when we were running away, like afterwards, for example, as a two or three year old I remember, we were rushing to the shelter when the sirens were blaring over Kolín because there was a huge bombing. You know, they destroyed the station, the petrol factory, all those big factories were destroyed, a lot of people died. Even from us, two of my friends' fathers died in the petrol factory during the morning shift. We had a shelter like that in our garden too, and I know they started hooting that we were running there, and it was full of water. As the ground water rose, we stayed in a ditch afterwards. But it wasn't because we were being bombed, it wa because shrapnel was flying far away from Kolín. So it was moments like that, well."