Alena Jiroušková

“Later we received a package and inside the package there was dad’s suit, his shirt and his undershirt and… you cannot wash blood. The Germans were so precise that they had washed everything, but the clothes had large brown blood stains everywhere. We thus knew that he had been through hell there, together with all the others. He was then taken to Brno, and there he was executed, shot, on October 20th.”

“One day early in the morning I suddenly heard a terrible cry. I got up from my children’s bed and ran into the kitchen and there I found my mom lying on the ground and screaming: ‘They killed our daddy.’ Something happened with me at that moment: as if darkness engulfed me. It was strange, because I have forgotten absolutely everything. I forgot how we had played with dad, sung together, exercised together. Of course I knew that I my father had been there, but some kind of a wall was erected and it was over. No memory, nothing. Only many years later I understood that it was actually a defence mechanism of my child’s body to prevent it from a collapse”