Ing. Jiří Slezák

"Russian planes appeared, those Ilyushin twins, which flew very slowly. There were always six of them and one after the other, they would dive down on the queue behind the village. They didn't fire in the village, only behind the village, they fired a burst from their guns and dropped a bomb. And again, that circle of planes moved in the direction that those Germans were marching. Another plane made a circle, made a burst from the guns, two-centimetre guns, and they dropped a bomb. The Germans were firing their guns at them, and the shells were shining, especially when it was in the early evening, so we could see - the sky was full of shining German shells. But the Russian Ilyushin didn't mind, they were armoured underneath, that's why they flew so slowly. But not one of those Ilyushin... at least we didn't see it get shot down. Just before the end of the war, there were the famous German jets, the Swallows, die Schwalbe in German, well, that was it for us, I was a 13-year-old boy, and I was gaping! A plane without a propeller! And it was already flying at about 600 or 700 kilometres an hour. So these planes were already there fighting the Russians. But there was no crash of a German or Russian plane in Grygov."

"As a child, I remember when the Gestapo searched our house. It was interesting, they threw out everything. Until they got into the closet where my mother kept her laundry. In one part, next to the laundry, they found red books. They thought it was communist literature. They were so happy! You have no idea how happy the Gestapo were and started pulling out the books and opening them. But because they were Germans who knew Czech because, in Olomouc, almost every Czech knew German, and every German knew Czech. So when they started to open it, they found out it was my mother's red library. It was girls' romances and my mother had it hidden in her dresser [laughs]. They got so mad, the Germans! They started shouting, slammed everything on the ground, threw some more stuff around and left. That was my experience with the Olomouc Gestapo in our house."

"The year 39 came, and March 15th. The weather on March 15th was rather cold, with a few flakes falling here and there. In the village, we heard - because we already had a radio - that we were occupied by the German army. The next day, my mother sent me because my father was a railroad man and so we had a directorial ticket. I was already six years old at that time. My mother would send me to Olomouc to pick up medicine or something like that. She believed I could do it. I was quite an independent boy. I arrived in Olomouc and saw German soldiers. It was interesting for me because our soldiers wore shirts, and the German soldiers - it was quite cold at that time - didn't have shirts, only undershirts. And, of course, the uniforms were different. What interested me there was that there was a German soldier in front of the station, and he had a big ladle in his hand and a big pot of hot soup in front of him. There was a queue in front of him and he was handing out the soup to people. That was on the 16th of March. And somebody was probably filming it. Whether it was Czechs or Germans waiting for the soup, I don't know. But it was like that. Olomouc was one-third German, so I assume it was mostly Germans. So that was my first experience of the Germans taking over us."