Eva Teichmannová

"Just before the end of the war we went back to where my mother was... it was a barber shop because they had a cellar. Like they used to have it in those houses. A proper cellar. That's how we lived through the war, as the front went on, there. And we were so unlucky that when the Russians fired those katyushas, they hit the top. The top of the house. So I know it still had to be extinguished. And us in the basement. And the guys, I don't know who else was in the cellar with us, they were putting out the top. And that's where we had our liberation, actually. And all I know is that my dad said, 'Well, we have to welcome the liberators. Where's the bottle?! I'm going to honour them.' That's true. As soon as the first Soviets appeared, with a bottle on the way, he said: 'We will welcome them there.' Well, I know that with that bottle and together with some other neighbors, they were welcoming the liberators there."

"There was one room – women – and the other room was men. And behind those two rooms, there was this big kitchen. And I remember there was something like what we now call a daybed – back then we used to call it a prašťák. That’s actually where, when my mother worked longer in the afternoons, I had a resting corner as a child. That’s where I would sometimes even doze off, before we left for the Fifejdy, right there in the kitchen. It was a big kitchen, and that’s really where the main life happened. Even though there was a living room and a bedroom upstairs, all of life, as long as the hair salon was open, was really lived in that big kitchen downstairs."