Helena Svobodová

"As I said, my mother was born on August 21. We had a family custom that we always had the celebrations a day or half a day before. So we'd have this little family celebration, and then the TV was on, and I remember they were showing the movie The River Casts Its Spell. Suddenly my mum got alert and said, 'I can hear tanks.' We said, 'Please don't be silly. It's harvest time. The engines in the combines are exactly the same.' And she said, 'No. You can't talk me out of it. I can hear the tanks. I remember the sound from the '45.' So we went up to the street. So we went to listen. So it was a proper rumble, but it was sort of said at the time that it was supposed to be a Warsaw Pact military exercise. We said, 'Yeah, you're right. The tanks were definitely going to be there, but when they said it was going to be an exercise, the armies were moving at night.' Well, yeah, but around five o'clock, or even midnight, like a white lady, it didn't give my mother a chance and she said, 'I can hear them now, again, on Liberecká Street.' We said: 'Mom, please, sleep. Of course they have to go in some sort of way.' At five in the morning dad woke us up, saying that we are occupied."

"My grandfather, he was still working at Mr. Behr's company. Grandma was a housewife. All those young people, those adolescents, were obliged to join the so-called arbeitsdienst, the labour service. So it was something like six months. My mother was somewhere near Trnovany, near Ústí nad Labem. They were always assigned to some farmer or some work. They took turns, they weren't with one all the time. Mom remembers that because she was already trained as a ladies' dressmaker, she wasn't usually with the animals on the farm, but the peasant woman would let her sew, fix something and so on. She did the arbeitsdienst in two cycles. She was like that for two six months somewhere around Ústí and then when her service was over, she was actually also deployed in the former Totex in Chrastava, when that factory was converted to war production like all the factories in the area, and she had one terrible experience there, because in the neighbourhood in Bílý Kostel there was a camp where Jewish women were imprisoned and my mother worked as a draughtswoman in the construction and the guys who were there were mostly Lusatian Serbs. Still maybe war invalids or wounded. One day the head of the construction told my mother to take some papers and go with him. He took her to the plant where these unfortunate women were employed, and he says: 'Just watch, don't say anything, don't react in any way, but remember.' That was a shocking experience for her, because they were skinny, cut to the skin, with boxes on their feet instead of shoes. Terrible."