Bedřich Gregorini

"We didn't speak Czech, and my mother told us that if we spoke, we would be killed. She had her husband's Argentinian passport, so they couldn't attack her. But because we were, as you can see in the photos, two exactly the same boys, only my mother recognized us. We were so well-mannered that when she told us to keep quiet, we kept quiet. But it's a picture that I can't forget until the day I die, and what a horror it must have been for our mother. Because she knew that if we opened our mouths, all three of us would go down. My mother didn't speak Czech, she knew German and Spanish from that Argentina."

"So on 31 July, we went to Ústí to visit the notary. He wasn't coming for a long time, so my mother and I went back to the station, and the man we went to see was lying dead in the street. That was the situation when the ammunition had exploded in Krásné Březno, and the Czech patriots were convinced that the Germans had done it. So they were chasing German citizens on the street and everywhere, and it was easy because Germans had to wear a white armband. They had long sticks pierced with long nails, and when they captured a German, they surrounded him and beat him to death. We saw that. We went to this station, which was bombed out, so we could see the Štrekov Bridge. And we saw a pram flying into the Elbe, we thought with a child, and behind it was the mother. Then we read that the pram went separately, and then the mother with the baby, but that she was lucky to be pulled out by some Dutchmen who were mooring a boat there. But many Germans were not so lucky, they only got out of the water in Dresden."