Jana Paterová

"By then, my dad had stopped communicating, stopped his correspondence with those writers. He knew Halas from the military service; that's where they met. He writes in his memoirs that he taught Halas to write poems and awakened in him his poetic ability. He exchanged letters with Zahradníček, with Seifert, but it all just ended in the 1950s and he closed in on himself."

"An army corps passed through Kroměříž; they were Romanians under Russian command. There are big barracks there. When the Germans were stationed there during the war, I was told to walk the other side of the street: 'Never walk close to the Germans'. Russians took the place after the war and a Russian officer stayed with us. He was amazed because my sister and I knew Cyrillic and Russian. To this day, I still remember some of the poems dad had taught us. Pushkin, Lermontov and so on. He had this batman who was a Volhynian Czech, and we got on very well with him. The Nazis set the castle tower on fire during Kroměříž's liberation. We knew the frontline was approaching and we were like, 'well, it's coming...', so we left the shelter. Suddenly, the Germans are coming back. My sister and I each had a little briefcase with a piece of paper with the and name on it and a little blanket. Those were really small cases, like the ones kids carry pencils in today. So, the Germans are coming back, what now? We had this big pram, and my parents put us in, the girls took their briefcases and we went to the hospital where there was a big shelter in the basement. Many Romanians were killed; I remember they dug up the little park in the square and buried the Romanians there."