Jarmila Potomáková

"I have bad memories of the Russians because they didn't know what a toilet was. They climbed into bed and urinated on mattresses. They used it as a toilet. It was terrible. My dad always told me, 'When you hear the rumbling footsteps, hide all the clocks under the couch.' So I hid the clocks from the Russians. A bike was a devil machine for them. They were soldiers who came in the front line, such a rabble. What they didn't steal, they didn't have. They were followed by officers and those were finally intelligent people. They were even sewing at my dad´s place. They told him that he should go to Moscow to sew, that he would be well paid there."

"I know my dad listened to a foreign radio station, that he listened to London. We had an SS man in our house behind the wall. He was at a front, but his parents lived there. One day he came on vacation, saying that he heard it and that he would report us. But his mother, Mrs. Hudková, told his son, "You can't do that because they are very good people." Then we didn't listen to the radio at our house anymore, but we walked across the station to an acquaintance from Přívoz."

"The alarm blared and we went to the shelter in the basement. I took a doll under my arm and a kettle of water because we didn't know how long we would be there. This was repeated several times. I went to school on Nádražní třída, it was called U hodin. It was near the former Svoboda cinema. We had to go to the shelter sometimes several times a night and in the morning we went to school normally. And my dad always said to me, 'Never stay in that shelter at school.' He had this tape on his hand and was tasked with chasing people who were outside at the time of the alarm to go to the shelter. So, he always said he would come for me, and he did. He got there through various alley ways, so I was never in that school shelter."

"The cousin Rudolf had a guitar and he played the guitar, and I was in Skrochovice with another cousin. He already knew he would be deported, so we told him to leave the guitar to us, even though we didn’t know how to play, and he said, 'I'd rather break it than leave it to the Czechs.' "

My (Jarmila's) uncle from Nový Jičín settled in a villa confiscated from the Germans. He still had one of the original owners in the basement. "And he didn't treat him very well. The German was an educated man, and her uncle made it clear to him that he was German. My parents kept telling him to treat him a little differently. Well...The confiscation was enough, wasn't it?”

"The residents were half Czechs and half Germans in the house on Mariánskohorská Street. Family Hudkovi lived next door and they had a son within the SS, who once returned unexpectedly on vacation. My dad was listening to foreign radio he had on the wall, and their son wanted to turn us in. However, his mother begged him not to do it, because we are good neighbors and that they sew for us - so he did not do it. After that my father stoped listenning the radio at home and we went to Ostrava – Přivoz to his acquaintance to listen to the broadcast ‘London calling.‘”