PhDr. Ladislav Nezkusil

“Mainz was broken to bits, it was a city of something over a million, and destroyed. They said at the time that it had forty thousand dead people and about eighty thousand without shelter. When people spoke of the air raids, they said in general - the air raids demolished the houses, razed the city, but it was very complicated. What would happen, say, was that they’d raze the city, but the school in which we lived remained untouched, but there was no water, no electricity, you couldn’t cook anything. So we ate cold food. If you were wounded, the hospitals were crammed, full of people. This was all connected with the city being razed. Smoke everywhere, and when the wind blew, we’d say: ‘I can smell smoked meat.’ Like when we smoked meat in the village, when we slaughtered a pig.”

“And before sunrise I reached the town [of Smidary], and I went round it so that no one would see me, and I hurried on along the road to Vinary. I met one boy there, who I used to play with. I reckoned: ‘Man, this is bad.’ He was riding somewhere with some horses. He served under a farmer during the war, otherwise he was a labourer. He worked at the factory in Skřivany. He didn’t recognise me. And I thought he was pretending he didn’t recognise me, so he wouldn’t say anything, so he wouldn’t blab that he saw someone. So I told him: ‘Jarek, I’m on the run from the Reich.’ - ‘Oh, that’s you, Láďa, look at you! You’re just skin and bones. I couldn’t recognise you at all. Would you like a piece of bread?’ I said: ‘No, I’ll be home soon. Don’t delay me, but don’t tell anyone you met me.’ There was path and dirt road leading off from the main road, and that took me all the way home. I got to the slope, I ran across it. I ran across the meadow to our house, and I thought: ‘There isn’t much light yet, I’ll be in luck, no one will see me.’ Because where we lived, we bordered with the meadow. So I ran up there, and the door was closed. So I tried the latch to see if I could open it. And Dad happened to pass by, and he said: ‘I can see a bloke, I guess you’re hungry, right?’ I said: ‘Yes, I am.’ Only then did he recognise that it was me, so he opened the door. We hugged. I ran into the kitchen, Mum was preparing coffee for breakfast. She almost lost it, to put it simply. So she poured me some coffee as well, so I took the coffee, a piece of bread, and I lay down. I said: ‘I have to go sleep in the barn, so no one sees me.’ - ‘Oh, none of that, lie down here, and we’ll deny you’re here, we won’t let anyone in.’ So I slept for about a day, or even a bit longer.”