Helena Šilhanová

“The worst was when the first bombing came. We didn’t know they would begin bombing us. Little planes flew overhead, we watched them, and suddenly bombs started flying. We had to rush into the cellar; houses collapsed and people were stuck in the cellars, it didn’t kill them. That was towards the end of the war. I was so nervous that I slept with my clothes and shoes on because I wasn’t able to tie them up. We ran to the cellar and sat there until it was over.”

“After 1945, when the war ended, my Dad was employed at the post office. And because the Germans were being deported from the border regions, they needed people there. They assigned my dad to the post office in Česká Lípa, where the postmistress was a German. She was to be deported, so we moved in there with Dad. The daughter of the postmistress was expecting a baby. They were Germans, they only spoke German, I felt terribly sorry for them. I was as old as you, I was fourteen at the time. They had to line up and go into those concentration camps. In the meantime she gave birth to her baby. I made friends with her, I was fourteen, she was twenty-one. They sent her to Česká Lípa, to the concentration camp, and I went to visit her there. The ones who guarded her said: ‘What are you doing here? You’re Czech, you’ve no business being here.’ I said: ‘I’m going to visit her, she has a baby.’ So I visited her, and she told me that there was a picture in the post office, where they lived, and that she had some money hidden behind it. And whether I could take the picture down and bring her the money.”