Anna Musilová

"When the frontline moved to Brno, the father of my classmate Karla Huňařová (they had three girls, a fourth on the way) was walking through Brno, and the Germans, probably out of anger, rounded up a few people they came across in Brno. To make a long story short, long after the war the family searched for the father. He had not returned from that city for a very long time, and when they searched for what had happened, it was finally discovered that the Germans had collected about 6-8 men and forced them to dig a grave outside Brno, into which they threw them (alive). This is how they ended up. My classmate’s father! It turned out that one of the Gestapo officers eventually confessed when they were investigating what had happened. Then he had to show them where the terrible event happened. Then they had to identify them only by their clothes, watches and the like, because of course they must have gone crazy there or what do I know."

"Sometimes it would happen that one had to wait for a train to pass by for the track to be free. Coming from the opposite direction, we saw a train, they were cargo trains and at the time we would call them piggeries, and in them, in the open carriages, there were Germans sitting on the ground. Squeezed one next to the other and even behind each other – they were truly sitting on the ground. And we, the children, were coming from the opposite direction. Back then, as a child, I felt compassion for them in the heat. I had kind of experienced what they were guilty of… that they were there all one next to the other like that and they were being taken away?"

“I have to say that the enthusiasm was all around the country. I’d like to also point out that it’s a shame that that enthusiasm didn’t hold out longer, because then it didn’t matter to us that we kids had to go to school on Saturdays, there was school, people worked till Saturday and then there were work groups on Sundays. Brno was cleaned up, it had been bombed a lot, because Brno was very industrial, so when someone walked through Brno after the war, it was pretty disheartening. Then the celebrations in Líšeň began, the Gottwald celebrations, once a year. The whole hillside full of people, we also liked to go to them because there was always a fantastic all-day program. Of course, Klement Gottwald came there too and I have to make it clear that the enthusiasm after the war was so huge that we didn’t care if we had to go to the work groups on Sundays, that the harvest work groups were during the summer holidays. It was something totally different. After the war, Mom got a job as a foreign language correspondent for the 1st Brno Machine Works and, of course, she got the offer to join to the Party, so she joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. And I joined the ČSM, the Youth Union, and the kids the Pioneers. At that time we saw everything as right because it was being built. That’s how we built this country. Everything that was said, we thought all of it was right.”

“So we finished with the war...” – “...with the war. After it, I can say that there was incredible enthusiasm. I can still remember when suddenly on the 8th of May or the 9th there were sirens all over Brno. We all ran outside, scared that there was going to be another air raid, everyone was terrified, and someone said that the war had ended, finally peace! And I remember how everyone was hugging each other. We said: ‘We’ll eat dry bread, just dry bread, as long as there’s no more war, no more...’ Then we came to know that there had been various looting. And the hunger wasn’t over. I can still remember how the rations were: a fourth liter of milk daily for children, the sixteen-hundred for adults, a month’s worth of lard fit in a tiny cup, we didn’t even know any fruit, or hardly any vegetables, candy, chocolate – that I first tasted in Switzerland. But no, I could go on. Maybe everyone already knows how it was. Those dehydrated eggs, I can remember the picture on the bag, Turkish honey, everything. We kids barely knew anything.”

“But I still want to say – before that partisan showed up, something else I remember happened, that a head officer of a Russian squadron came there saying that his troops needed somewhere to stay. So there was this Russian squadron in Lotti’s house, while we stayed in the other house. I have to say that they took care of us. They gave us a cup of borsch, they gave us some Moscow bread, so they sort of like took care of us. Once, though, that head officer told Mom that on that day he couldn’t vouch for his men, I guess they wanted to celebrate something that night or something, and wanted us to leave for the night. Mom and I didn’t know where to go. We knew that in Brno there was a place we called the Písečňák. It was like a sort of cave made of sand, or something like that. We spent the night there. I can say that there were families moved in there, beds too, people were sleeping there, soldiers hiding from the front. It was really interesting, but we spent a night of horror there, because at night the people there put some stuff in front of the door so nobody could break in, because it was well-known that soldiers from the front raped women. Sure, understandably, they went terribly long without a woman, and suddenly we show up. It was a bit of everything, but they kept on saying it, but it’s also true that we heard the awful banging on the door and they wanted get inside tooth and nail, but they barricaded it, those guys that were there, so they really couldn’t get in.”