Bohumila Jindrová

“When the Steel Project [Pilsen] was founded, Stavoprojekt [Plzeň] supplied the builder, and the technology was supplied by Škoda, saying that it was given only for a while, and that the Steel Project [Pilsen] had to bring up its [own] technology; meaning recruit high school and engineer college students. I just came to the Metallurgical Project Pilsen at a time when the technologists were moving back to Škoda, when the project had its own (technology). And among these technologists was (the general) Tonda Liška, who helped (Mr. Svěrák) with writing a screenplay for the film Dark Blue World. It was one of the few RAF pilots that was not locked up. Because when he came back and was here, he went to work in Skoda. They didn't come for him to lock him up. And when he left the Metallurgical Project [Plzen], our amazing cadre man said to him: ´Look, if you want to avoid being checked, go to lynx and they will not be able to take you.' So Tonda Fox went to lynx and survived.”

“I got diphtheria. It was in the winter of 1943. At that time there was a general epidemy of diphtheria and spall. I know that some children even died in our village. I got diphtheria at St. Nicholas and my parents had me taken to the hospital in Pilsen. My grandmother was angry and stopped talking to her parents because she had the feeling that in the hospital I would die and they ought to have left me home. But Dad decided that it was more important that I went to the hospital. There were air raids in Pilsen and we had to go to the shelter. I remember once we got into the shelter, and it was a room equipped with a hospital bed and different medical instruments. There was a child who was transfused because there was blood everywhere. And that was the one time we got to that room. There was a glass door in the diphtheria patients pavilion that halved the pavilion on all floors. And on that ground floor there were German soldiers from the front who suffered from typhoid. Back then we didn't take it seriously, we basically perceived it as fun. … No sick German soldiers were let out from that cover. And they always pounded on the glass a lot, because they already knew what the air raids were and what might happen. They knew much more, and we had no idea.”