Josef Exner

"When we started going to school after war, we got our clothes from UNRRA. We got underpants, t-shirts and other things. We had lost everything. In winter, we only had one pair of shoes each and we were allowed to wear them only to school. When we came back from school, we had to take our shoes off. When we want to ride the sleigh, we wrapped our feet in rags, slid down the hill and ran back home to heat up our feet by the stove. We could put the shoes on only when we went to school."

“When we were hiding in the cellars and Stalin's Katyushas, the rocket launchers, fired and it started, our house was razed o the ground. We dug our way through the cellar window, only our goat stayed there. From there, we ran to Trojka [smallholder Jan Trojka's]. And when we ran around the church, the tower fell behind us. Across the main road, we ran, to the cellar at Trojka's. There were really many people there. The main part of the cellar was directly under the house but the advantage was that there were side rooms. There was shooting going on above us. Russians and Germans were taking turns in holding the area above us. When Mr. Trojek went to check horses and walked out, a bomb fell there, Trojek was hit. We ran away from there, people fled to two sids. Ones went towards Háj and Opava, the other ran towards Budišovice. We got to a neighbourhood called Argentina and we spent the end of the war there. At night, we saw the lights of the fire. There are not that many stars on the sky as there were lights during the fight for Hrabyně.“