"I remember it mainly because carriages went by for days, day and night. There were no horses, so the carts were pulled by cows, cattle. Those were ladder wagons and they carried the dead. I remeber that to this day, because there were arms and legs hanging down between those ladders, and as the wagons were going, it was all wobbling. It scared me terribly."
"We slowly crawled out and I ran out through the corridor to look into the passageway, and I stopped terrified because the passageway was completely full of people, packed with people who had fled from the collapsed and burning buildings and needed somewhere to hide. The corridor was also full of their things, though they didn't have that many things with them because they had fled with only their clothes on; few managed to take anything with them. When we came upstairs, the apartment was worse than the first time, with all the windows broken, the doors ripped out by the explosion shock waves, and it was quite frightening when we looked across the yard. There were these long lines of houses in which our friends and classmates lived, and two-metre flames were shooting from all the windows. It was all on fire, all on fire, which was pretty scary, but we just tried to clean up the glass and the essential things as fast as we could to wait until the morning, because nobody knew what or how was going to happen. The third wave came at four o'clock in the morning when they finished it. They bombed us for about 30-45 minuts. Then it started to dawn. And then we fell asleep upstairs for a while. We had a big apartment, with five rooms, and it was full of people. A lot of people stayed in that house, the passage was full, the yard was full. The problem, or luck, was that there were about four houses left standing in our street, with our house in the middle. Across the street, about a hundred metres away, there was a public shelter where people from the street could go if caught outside, and that got a direct hit. They kept pulling the dead out of there for about a week to come."
"The siren signalled the raid was over, so we went up and saw everything around us was on fire. We tried to clean up because some windows had burst in the meantime, but the sirens sounded again about an hour and a half later, so we ran down to the basement again and there was more nervousness and hurry because the staircase wasn't straight. It was in an arc and as people were running down from the higher floors, I know for a fact that somebody's suitcase had spilled and we were stumbling on the stuff trying to get down into the cellar. Everybody was in a hurry to get down there. There was a big passageway in the house to the backyard where there was a print shop, and there was a door from the passageway to the basement. The cellar design was peculiar in that the cellars throughout the whole street were inter-connected and only lightly walled, just bricks with no mortar, so that in danger you could get through to the next house to be sage or get out. We found out later it wasn't much use, though. The second air raid was different. It was after midnight and the bombs were hitting hard. I don't know how I would bear it today; I was scared as a child. It was weird because, on the one hand, the electricity was on all the time, the light was on in the cellar and the radio was playing. We listened to the announcements on what aircraft formations were coming, from where, how many of them there were and where they were leaving, and so on. But on the other hand, the explosions were quite scary. It would whistle long and loud, and then a loud thud. It was coming closer and closer, and it also made the plaster in the cellar drop more and more all the time, so we were all grey, covered by the peeled plaster."
"We cared mainly about the fact that there was a big table, like a billiard table, with a big massive frame. On it, there was a plastic landscape with roads, railways and everything. The scene was constantly being rearranged - they were probably preparing troop movements or something like that because there were soldiers moving around all the time. To this day, I don't know how it was that we were allowed to be and play there as kids - I guess it didn't matter because we were just kids."
Klaus Eduard Kürsten was born in Dresden on 2 April 1936. His father Erich Kürsten was German, enlisted in the anti-aircraft artillery in 1942 and was captured by the Americans. His mother Karolina Skabranská came from Poděbrady. Eduard Kürsten‘s childhood was affected by the Second World War. He lost his brother in 1941, and he witnessed the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. After the war he moved to Poděbrady with his mother and sister. He got his vocational training trained and joined ČKD in Prague-Vysočany as a test technician, where he worked until retirement. He photographed the events of the Prague Spring in August 1968, witnessed the extraordinary Vysočany Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and Palach‘s funeral. He would go to the West with the Prague Mixed Choir from the 1950s to the 1980s. He refused to join the Communist Party, but since he actively worked with children, the Communists did not prevent him from travelling abroad. He worked as a receptionist in an apartment building in Prague for several years. He was living in Prague in 2024.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
