"The battle of Brno was on and we survived the worst week of combat action in the cellar. We came out of the cellar into the apartment when it was peace. Well, it wasn't peace yet, but the battle of Brno was over. I think the fighting for Brno stopped on 26 April. Then the Russians would come for inspections. One time we were still in the cellar, and he came by and said, 'Sleep, sleep.' When the combat was over, one of them came to us. He was a younger man and not an ordinary soldier. I had an upright piano at home and I took lessons. He saw the piano and asled, 'May I play a little please? I went to the conservatory in Moscow.' So, of all things, a Russian played the piano in our house, and it was good, just good."
"There were air raids on Brno by then. A Mrs Pušpánová worked there [in Táborská Street]; she had a workshop with two seamstresses and an electric press. I went there with another girl from another school named Míla. We were deployed there. By then, the air raids on Brno had started, and we had our radio tuned to Vienna. When the bombers were approaching, Vienna stopped the broadcast and played the cuckoo, and when the cuckoo called, we put everything down and ran to Líšeň. There were tunnels carved in sandstone out."
"When I left the fourth grade of high school, I was home for a while. The girls who went on to fifth grade were totally deployed. They went to Kuřim to the Hermann Göring Luftwaffe Werke. I evaded that. Then the employment office found me too, so my mother went there with me. I was already attending Vesna by then. That's where my mother made me go so I wouldn't be at home. There was only one year of Vesna in Královo Pole, so I went there. When my mother told the officers that I went to Vesna and had learned to sew there, they sent me to Táborská Street to a workshop where we sewed military underwear."
Drahomíra Pazdírková, née Podborská, was born in a maternity hospital in Brno on 16 June 1926. Her father was a facility manager at Zemská pojišťovna and her mother a seamstress. She had an elder brother. The family lived in Malhostovice until 1930, then they moved to Brno-Královo Pole where Drahomíra went to a preschool and primary school. The family moved to Stará Street in the city centre at the beginning of World War II. She first attended the French Grammar School. It was closed after the occupation, so she went to a Czech school, and because she didn’t want to retake a maths test, her mother sent her to the Vesna girls’ school. That likely saved her from being deployed in an aircraft engine factory. Since she learned to sew at Vesna, the labour office placed her in a tailor’s shop. Drahomíra Pazdírková recalls the bombing of Brno and its liberation. She spent the final days of the war with her parents in a shelter under their house. She got married right after the war. Her husband Bedřich was an economist in a print shop and she was a clerk. They had two children, Vladimír and Nina. Bedřich died in 1972 and the witness never remarried. In retirement she became a member of the Czech Tourist Club and worked as a guide for Čedok. Later in life, she crossed paths with Vesna again. She enrolled in a memory training course. This led her to Sudoku. She enjoys reading detective and historical novels. She lived in Brno in 2025.
