“A lot of houses were destroyed during bombing and many people were killed in bombing during the war. And when there was bombing on the 11th of November, I remember that mum said that one of us was ill, so they stayed at home and me and another one ran backwards to Kudlov. And we got into the basement on some coal. I could totally feel the ground moving under us when they started to drop bombs. Father and mother and my ill sister stayed at home, they were in the basement. Fortunately, we were not hit. Nevertheless, there was a shelter where the railway station is and people who arrived by train to the railway station hid there. A bomb was dropped there that time and everyone there was killed. And when we left the basement, we saw that there was fire and factories were on fire. And mainly paper mills were on fire. There was no connection, nobody knew anything. It was horrible because it was the first bombing and I think the last one because it was in 1944. Brno was heavy bombarded as well and I don´t know... Americans took it here in one blow back then. It was before lunch at 11 o´clock, I remember it because those planes that were flying... It was strange because when the planes were flying up over Ostrava, they were flying high. And when they were flying too low, they were simply flying here.”
“I got to know the way my father had been in resistance movement only after the war - that he had prepared a rope in case Gestapo came for him to escape through a balcony and that would not let them catch him easily. And his activities during the war, resistance activities were that when he got to know about someone who had been arrested, he immediately went to inform all of his many friends and he immediately took them to hills where he had friends and they hid them in solitary houses so that Gestapo could not find them. And a partisan group led by major Murzin was active there. And they then joined partisans and stayed in forests. Then, as you can tell based on his narration, a Hungarian army was passing through that place so they gained some weapons from Hungarians in exchange for food. And he was transporting those weapons to the hills and gave them to people who had joined the partisans. Well, and I got to know everything only after the war because I could not know anything as a little girl.”
It is necessary to remember because those were evil times
Jiřina Pelikánová was born in 1929 in Zlín to Josef August´s family. Her father worked in Tomáš Baťa´s factories where he got to a resistance group around 1942. He later became a member of 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka and he was a messenger between Zlín and partisans in the mountains. Witness experienced bombing of Zlín in 1944. The family moved to Březová nad Svitavou after the war.