Tomáš Pertile

“A plane popped out from behind a hill. It was flying relatively low. And then bits starting falling from it. The crew were jumping out. The whole crew wasn’t there, but maybe around half was. A moment after the last one jumped, the plane blew up in mid-air. Shrapnel fell into the forest behind the village. There were fires in some places because there was quite a lot of gasoline and unused ammunition blowing up. Of course, after the war, a friend and I set out for the place where those pieces of shrapnel had fallen. We collected a big box of various little bits.”

“That day four-hundred sixty-one bombers set out for over Ostrava and Bohumín. They were four-motor bombers. Every motor had twelve-hundred horsepower, so each bomber had four-thousand eight-hundred horsepower. When you multiply by that number, well, you can imagine. Also, they weren’t flying at ten thousand meters and they didn’t have jet engines, but ones with pistons, which have a certain sound to them. So, the windowpanes rattled out of their jambs, and we were vibrating along with them. Nobody today would believe me, but I saw it with my very own eyes. Thinking that maybe they’d be able to see us from that low of an altitude, we started waving to them. Even if they had been looking, they couldn’t have seen us from those seven or eight thousand meters above. We knew they were on a bombing mission and we wished them the best of luck. We thought that at that altitude the Germans wouldn’t be able to get to them, which we were completely wrong about.”