Jiří Hemzal

“Here (not far from the witness´ house) a fascist, such a tough German lived, who moved in here from Hamburg. The Germans mostly occupied the houses of the Jews or wherever they could, and he moved here rather old, he was about fifty, and he was such a tough fascist. In the garden he built a kind of an altar, there was Hitler, and every morning he always came there greeting him with Sieg Heil and Heil Hitler 'and somehow terrified everyone in the neighbourhood. Unless we greeted him in German, it was not good. He began to scold the people and the others as Czech swines or pigs and promised that we all hanged out here on the linden tree. There was a large tree before, and a news stand.”

“My daddy moved down the basement and we lived – there was such a small cellar in the house - in a small cellar. We slept there I think almost 14 days to three weeks down there. But a week before the front came here, on the 25th the mortar cannons with the heavy shooting, the mortars falling down on the house. There was a two-meter hole in the roof. One fell in our garden. And then on the 26th suddenly all became so quiet. There were no big shooting, just an occasional gunshot. And my dad went to the door to see what was going on. Well, then he rushed back crying: ´The Russians are here already, come and have a look.´ There were about five or six Russian soldiers here with machine guns, shooting back there, because the Germans were fleeing uphill, so they shooting on them. They had cannon here that they always leaned on the sidewalk and made a large bang. Here the Germans let the people build the barricades, and so they shot the barricade and always as the cannon was not buried down in the ground, and the power of the explosion had no space to go off, it always moved by two or three meters, so they rearranged it again, leaned back on the sidewalk, charged, and shot again. So they destroyed the whole barricade. And then they shot at Dolní Žabovřesky.”