"They blindfolded us - and to Tatraplane. And they took us to the police, to StB. They started to interrogate us, as if we were anti-state, that we wanted to flee across the border. So I didn't give in, I was rude to them. They tried me. In the next room a man was shouting - and they wanted to scare me. But I told them they wouldn't scare me with that - I've been through different things than you have here. Well, I didn't give in. But they kept me there. I was in that remand for a week."
"Mom, when she left... I guess it was a mistake then, the attack was a little earlier and not reported. That was also the Americans... And my mom, when she left, told me to watch Libuška, who was six weeks old, in the pram by the shelter. To be there. She went with my brother and sister to Česká Street in Brno, where there was a tailor. We had there, from our church - they supported those poor peopleclike us a lot - so we had clothes made for us. One was for me and for my brother. Only, my sister didn't want to stay home and take care of the little ones, so my mother switched us, took Mařenka with her instead of me. And they came out of the Czech Street and went to Joštova Street. And I still condemn it to this day, that why did they bomb the tram? They could have bombed some factories or something... But the tram on Joštova got a direct hit. Mummy wasn't on the tram, Mummy was on the pavement. I saw that after the war... Mummy was on the pavement and then they found her there, hugging the children... On the pavement they got it. When the air attack happened, I started screaming so much. That was the first premonition I had in my life. I started screaming in that shelter, screaming, 'Mommy's dead, Mommy's dead'."
"The sirens started going off, and I still have this... I guess I call it a premonition that when the siren goes off on Wednesday, I have to shut everything down. I hate it. That's what's left from my childhood, that's the result of the war. That when the siren goes off, I have to... and it's unfortunate for me when the siren goes off and I'm out on the street. So it stayed with me... Because when I heard the siren going off during the war, I always got so scared. I hated it."
Eliška Vidakovičová, nee. Bugnerová, was born on 20 August 1933 in Brno, where she grew up. During the Second World War she experienced repeated bombing of Brno, which deeply affected her. Her mother, Marie, and two siblings, Maruška and Miroslav, were tragically killed in an air raid in April 1945. After the war, she faced difficult family circumstances and had to leave home very soon. In the early 1950s, she was arrested in Karlovy Vary and investigated by the State Security on the trumped-up suspicion of preparing an escape to the West. Despite all the losses and persecution, she married twice, built a family, raised three children and lived through other historical upheavals, including the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. In December 2025, at the time of filming for Memory of Nations, she was living in her apartment in Olomouc.
