Jarmila Lebedová

"The sirens started blaring. It was on Falkensteiner street [today Gorkéhostreet], And so quickly into the bunker. Well and I told myself, well I'll go and hide under Špilberk, it wasn't far. I flew under that Špilberk, but it was really last minute. I flew from behind the street, where now a tram rides, those gates are there still. I think, that it's accessible to people, everything that was there, under that hill. Oh how it was equipped. We could hide there. There were some supplies there, I don't know, how it all worked. But it was a truly tall hill, and so we hoped, that when a bomb falls there, it won't cave in. How it was packed in there! But what if I could not fit in there, little me. The policeman shouted at me: 'What are you still doing here, quickly, quickly!' I was then only a little bit away from the bunker. And so I fit in there and then it started falling. And so we waited out there, nobody was injured, fortunately. When they honked out, that the bombardment had ended, then this flood of people all over Brno, oh that was terrible."

"I remember that, because we had a trader with mixed goods three house down, he brought two boxes up to the attic, it was a stone of sugar. We had a butcher as a neighbor, and so - meat wasn't accessible just like that - but for the whole duration of the war we still had a little bit more given to us under the counter, than was specified on the cards. On the cards there was for example one sixteenth of milk for one person. And so homemakers, when they wanted to make cake, then a few of them found out, that soda water could also be used for cake. It didn't have the same taste of course, but a cake was baked and turned out nicely. And who was able to, had a garden or grew something, so that they could supplement their diet, because what was on the cards, well that was one sixteenth of milk per person. And so at breakfast in the morning, there was only black coffee - it was cereal coffee, not real coffee, that wasn't possible at all, maybe only some high-ranking politicians, but we didn't know coffee at all. Well and that menu for mothers was very hard back then. Who had a bit of a garden, they grew something. vegetables, salad, kohlrabi, trees were planted, were it could be done, fruit trees. And still in the end it wasn't on the cards."