"My husband and I experienced a big raid. We wanted to get married and went to Vysočina. My husband was from Vysočina. We were returning and our train was leaving at 11 o'clock. And we waited for 11 o'clock. And suddenly the railway men, the German railway men, led us all to the shelter, saying a big raid was reported. As there was an old railway station in Pardubice, there is such a lookout tower - a piece of it and there are shelters. Like a park and all that are the shelters that were there. We were at the station, we were standing there on the platform and suddenly: 'Schnell, schnell, schnell!' So we ran... And by the time we got to the shelter, the bombing started. And then the people… I say to myself, 'We won't go far! What if it would all get covered up or something, we wouldn't get out at all. 'So, I was standing under a fan and suddenly the bombs started falling on Fant's factories. I couldn't even exhale, you know, because of the pressure?! And it passed and began again. They smashed the Fant's factories and smashed the station. It was a big raid and we were there! Well, we were horrified. If we get out or not. But first they destroyed that Fantovka. There was a moment of calm, silence. Well, maybe there will be silence, maybe we'll go out, I thought. And suddenly they started bombing at the station - the second time. The thunders again."
"It was still tuberculosis. There was a hospital in Boleslav and there was tuberculosis. The men were skinny. I got there too, but as a help. But those people looked, I got scared of them. I got there, I was there on behalf of someone, a woman. I went there, I brought them food. And I was looking at those people, so I got scared. I laid the food on the table and ran away. It stank there, it was cervical tuberculosis, and people were dying from it. There was a dressmaker, a twenty-three years old woman. She was asking everyone in the room that she had sunken eyes and what did she get it from?! And she asked me too. She was telling me, 'Miss tell me the truth, I'm probably going to die, is it bad with me?!' she cried. I was sorry for her. She was a trained dressmaker and she told me that. I was sorry for her. She died, she died. She was dressed like a bride. And how many people died there. You know, I saw ugly things... "
"It was for the winter. A pig was killed and a bag of flour and everything, a barrel of mashed cabbage, and it was all at home. And it was the way we lived to survive the winter. Those were winters back then. Even minus 30 degrees, you know, yeah. Without slippers, one would not be able to get out. But it was nice. I can't complain. - Was there a shop in Lúky? - There were no shops, but with someone (they refilled supplies). Where someone had cows and so, they told us, or maybe they told me in the summer: 'Look, this and that person told me, if you pasture a cow on a chain at the balk, they'll give us cottage cheese.' So I went and we got cottage cheese for it. And that's how it was."
Anastázie Lorencová, née Muráriková, was born on September 18, 1920 in the village Lúky pod Makytou, near the town Púchov in Slovakia. She remembers her childhood in this small village near today‘s Czech-Slovak state border. After the graduating from a town school, she had to work in agriculture and as a domestic help instead of doing what she studied. In 1941, she went with her sister Julia to work on a large farm in Lobeč in the Mělník region. During the Second World War, she worked for a year in the Mladá Boleslav hospital with patients with tuberculosis. In the summer of 1944, she and her future husband Josef hid in the shelter of the Pardubice railway station during a large-scale bombing of the neighboring Fant refinery there. She experienced the turbulent end of the war, when there were shootings, in the village Doubravice near Mladá Boleslav. In 1946, she and her husband moved to Mimoň in the Českolipsko region to work. Here they raised their son Josef. Until her retirement in 1976, she worked as a worker in the Ton factory in Mimoň, where furniture was made. She never joined any political party. In February 2020, she lived in the Home for the Elderly in Mimoň.
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!
