Josef Adam

"Our German class teacher came in the morning, we had to stand up, raise our paws and sing that God should protect our Führer and something. We, the crazy pupils, decided one day that we’re no way going to do that. So, we stood up, we didn't raise our hand and we didn't sing. And that was trouble... Dad had to go to school and got scolded for encouraging Czech children to hate Germans. So, we had to be careful, and we had to behave really like mousey little mouses somewhere on the side."

"I also remember the prisoners being dragged through the village. The English and the Australians among them were wearing hats. They were quite well off, but the Russians, they were poor. They were locked up in a barn with a local farmer, Weber, and their patrol carried a piece of bread and threw it into the barn and had a good time as the Russians fought over it. They were skinny and they were people who were at the bottom of life. The English were getting some parcels from UNRA, which supplied these camps, but the Russians were very badly off. I don't know how many didn't survive. They were buried somewhere, and they interrogated this Weber to tell them where the graves were, but I don't remember how it turned out."

"For example, when Dresden was raided, it was something big. They were flying in the evening and there was a red glow over Dresden. The handles on our doors and windows were shaking from the bombing. The people there must have really hard time. I was employed by Chirana afterwards and a lady said that she gave birth in Dresden on this night when the bombing took place. She said they had wrapped the baby and she ran with the baby through the burning streets outside. She said it was terrible. I still remember that the bombing of Dresden was horrible. Later they called it Stalin's Works, but then it was Hermann-Göring-Werke and they were making synthetic gasoline from coal for airplanes and so on."

"All of a sudden the local Germans made this explosion. The Czechs got a beating because it was their way. What were Czech shops, houses, everything was smashed. It was the fifteenth of March, I remember that. The snow fell and the village was like it had died out. And now the broken windows gave a bad, you could say ghostly impression. Dad was taken to the village office on that St. Bartholomew's Night, he was spanked and released in the morning. He was interrogated. My mother went to the village office and said: 'If you don't let him out by morning, I'll wreak havoc!' That's how it went. A lot of Czechs who were interrogated walked around with bruises. The Germans were able to prepare some respect."

"You could still hear the planes flying. We had fifty kilometres to Dresden, over the Erzgebirge, and the door handles were shaking, the windows... Then you could see a huge red glow over the whole of the Erzgebirge."

"At the Bohosudov railway station there is a memorial to 312 victims of the march, who were dragged from a concentration camp. The guards, because it was already towards the revolution, escaped and left the people in the wagons. So, when someone dared to open the wagon and give them water, they found that 312 of them were dead."