Marie Snášelová

"The way I remember the liberation is that we lived in the cellar for fourteen days towards the end of the war, because our apartment was occupied by some military commandos and we had to stay in the cellar. We cooked there. It wasn't just us, a family of four with two aunts, or six. But there were also neighbors who didn't have such cellars that they could use them as air-raid shelters. Well, we had a cellar prepared like that. We had a stove for cooking. A little cabin. We even slept there. There was coal in the corner, but otherwise we had a spacious cellar under the whole house and we waited to see what was going on outside. That's when mom always came out. She'd just seen someone crawling in the garden. It was a German soldier and he was hungry, so my mother gave him a cup of soup, but then she was called back to the cellar because there was a threat of bombing again."

"As children we saw [the Germans coming] as a change. A change in standard, ordinary life. That something new was happening. At school, we noticed it by changing the picture at the head of the classroom where Dr. Beneš was. And then the new head statesman was hung there, it was Hitler. And I had nothing else to do but... I liked to draw. Back then, not now. That I drew [Hitler] with a few strokes in the dictionary and the teacher admired it, that it was a faithful likeness of our Leader. I brought it home, I showed it, and the teacher praised it, so my mother shed a tear."