Jiřina Lukešová

"Suddenly the sirens started blaring and the alarm was sounded. I grabbed my cousin's hand, 'Come on, let's go home.' But now the train dispatcher came to me and said, 'Where are you going?' They were friends. And he says, 'Nowhere! You're going to the shelter.' I said no, I'm not going. He grabbed my hand. And I was so angry with him, I bit his hand. That's when he let me go. I grabbed my cousin's hand and ran out of the station. We ran all the way. By then, planes were flying overhead, dropping bombs. I didn't know at the time what they were dropping them for. We were a far away from it. All we could hear was the explosions and the burning. We came to the village where my aunt was waiting for us. She was terrified because somehow they had also learned that the station had been bombed too. Then the air raid ended and one of my uncles, also a retired train dispatcher, went there to see. The station was really broken. He actually came to get me because there was an express train coming, but they didn't know what the station was like. So he took me and we went to look at the tank. It was terrible. The station was broken. And the dead bodies that were lying there! I also saw a train conductor rushing me to the shelter. His stomach was ripped open. It was a terrible experience."

"We climbed the heap like kids. One day my mom dressed me up, she was going to go to the park with me. I know I was wearing white štrample [tights] and some nice bright dresses. And my friends and I were going to rush to the heap. We took some paper, some big parchment [cardboard], and we climbed up and we went down. You can imagine what I looked like. I got a beating from my mother because instead of white things, everything was black. There wasn't much coal on the pile anymore. People who were socially disadvantaged would go there and collect coal."