"Mother's brother, the youngest one, was forced to work in Germany during the war. They used the fact that Dresden had been bombed. With a band of boys they stole some two-wheeled hand carts. Every night they would go a certain number of kilometers. They walked on foot from Dresden to Nečín. There they were locked in a cellar. The Procházka family had three cottages in total, one was on its lonesome in the woods. They locked the boys in there and held them there until the war was over."
"We took part when the word was on the street that the Americans were in Plzeň. And so we went on to meet the Americans. The Motol hospital was on the right side, if we were to go to Plzeň. The crematorium was in a little depression and the hospital on a little hill. When we got to the crematorium, German planes flew by and started shooting at us. Beside me stood the Jiráček family, our neighbors from our home. I will to this day see Mr. Jiráček, how he raised his head, put his hands [above it]. How it hit him right in the head and how he sank. I remember that, how Mr. Jiráček lost his life when we were on our way to welcome the Americans."
"What I saw, because I was attending the grammar school in Smíchov, the bombs had also fallen on Karlovo náměstí. We went there to look around later. It was being worked on there, because they were looking for people, who would eventually survive. They laid the dead on one side and later took them into the church which stood on Karlově náměstí. So the people could better identify [them], to find out, if any of them didn't belong there with the rest of them."
Alena Majkusová was born on the 27th of June 1929 in Prague to a family of bureaucrats. Her father Vojtěch Šebor took part in the Russian anabasis as a legionary during the First World War. In the city quarter of Košíře in Prague 5 she experienced the coming of the German occupation army in the year 1939 and later the seizures of Jewish property. After the implementation of a ration system her family had to deal with an insufficiency in basic goods. In the year 1942 her relatives, the wedded couple Hoškovi, were executed in the concentration camp Mauthausen, who had earlier in the year 1942 helped the parachutists, including Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. The witness has experienced the bombardment of Prague in February 1945 and also the attack of a German fighter on the civillian population in the last days of the war. During the Prague Uprising she built barricades with her neighbors. After the war she studied medicine and worked as a doctor for children. At the medical high school in Klatovy she briefly taught the known child serial killer Marie Fikáčková. She entered retirement in the year 1989 from the position of city pediatrician in Plzeň. She lived in west Bohemian metropole at the time of the recording in 2021.
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