Jiří Jeřábek

“As a ten-year-old boy, I somehow managed to get separated from my parents and I got to the main street where the Russians were arriving. I don’t remember any tank army there, but I remember that all the soldiers were covered in dust. People were welcoming them. There was a kind of eerie atmosphere of being liberated from the Germans.”

“By coincidence I witnessed the arrival of the German army to Prague when I was four years old. I was with my parents on the first floor of the Lucerna Palace; there are offices there today. There was a café and we were standing there, I was standing on a chair and I absolutely couldn’t understand why on earth the people were crying… I didn’t understand why they were crying and why the women held handkerchiefs. The reason why I remembered it was through a special connection in my memory, because I had a small toy tank when I was a boy, and it was in the Czechoslovak army camouflage colours which they used for their tanks and vehicles: green, brown and yellow.”