Miroslav Polák

"So we moved in, we had a small cellar under the house, so we moved in. We put blankets in there because we didn't know how long it was going to last. There were four of us moved in there, that we would wait out the line. We couldn't see out at all, there was a little window, but it was below ground level so you couldn't see out of it. So we waited, waited, waited. Then about Wednesday, or it was Thursday morning, suddenly there was a terrible noise in the house and somebody was breaking in. And by then the Russian troops were already there. And then there was a terrible shouting, a terrible noise. Now they broke into our cellar. It was dark, there was no electricity, but there was no electricity. So it was dark, he had a torch or something and he was shining it. And now he saw my mother there and he lunged at her. And then he saw the mother and rushed at her. Well, the father tried to intervene somehow, but he immediately pulled out a submachine gun. So the father had to back off, but luckily, someone upstairs heard the shouting, and a Russian officer came down and, at gunpoint, led the attacker away."

"I sat in the furrow and waited for them to finish. It was the autumn of 1944. And then a bomber formation flew high above us. That was maybe hundreds of planes, Anglo-American planes, headed for Nuremberg, the Ruhr, etc. to bomb. And it would come over like that and they would fly at altitudes of, I don't know, six or seven kilometers. We had a station in sight. That was about five hundred meters away from us. And there was a train with a smoking locomotive at that station. And all of a sudden there was a sort of a sound, a sort of a squeaking sound, from the bundle, which was flying very high. And there was a fighter jet coming down. So now, of course, everybody stayed to see what was going on, where it was going. The fighter flew over in front of us, I don't know, 30 meters or so. Now the cockpit opened up, the cockpit cover. And I see this, there was a black guy, and he's waving something like this. We were looking at what. We'd never seen a black man before. And he was waving something at the plane. So we waved back. He flew this one more time around and then he shut it down. And now he started shooting at the train that was standing there at the station. And especially the locomotive. He blew up the locomotive. Now there was a cloud of steam and he flew away. He apparently joined the section that was up there and flew away."