Jiřina Dupalová

“I remember that I woke up at about five in the morning, and I wanted to go have a drink. We always had a glass of cold water on the window sill, and as I came to the window, across the street - I was walking with my eyes closed, so as not to rouse myself too much - a shot rang out. I looked, and there were German soldiers standing across the street. So I quickly pulled away. Well, and then they started throwing grenades, by the church there. Such a racket, we didn’t know what was going on. It looked like it was happening in the house next door. We had a wardrobe in the wall like this, so we climbed into it and peered out of a crack to see what was going on. Well, and we saw there were lots of dead people there. They hadn’t closed the street off, they let the people go on their way to work, and they shot them up.”

“When we went to school, we’d go past the church with one friend of mine, and she said: ‘Come on, let’s look inside the church, we’ve been walking by it for a year and we’ve never been inside.’ So we went there, and it was kind of gloomy there, but she was so curious that she went all the way behind the altar. I stayed by the entrance, so I could make a run for it. So I looked around, and there were these two little windows, like there used to be in cinemas, and I saw an eye of some kind, that someone was observing us, probably one of the paratroopers. And I said: ‘Jindra, let’s go, I don’t want to be here!’ Well, so we left, and a few days later all this took place.”