Ing., CSc František Valeš

“It was when we had a break and suddenly we heard an awful explosion. It was close to the pond; there is a large pond in Žinkovy. On one side of the pond, near the village, there is a pub where we were performing and just as we had a break, we heard the explosion and the windows blew open and close again. There was a gamekeeper’s lodge on the opposite side of the pond. When the gamekeeper was not at home, he would keep the lights on as a measure against poachers. A small airplane which was to drop a bomb on the Hitlerjugend accommodation facility flew in there. The place was in Žinkovy and it was called Chata – now there is a sports centre and a sports hall there, but at that time there was a building, a hotel, and Hitlerjugend stayed there. They had their training there and they were taking turns in the facility. This English airplane was to drop the bomb on that building. There was allegedly some light next to the chimney. But the pilot noticed the big light in the gamekeeper’s lodge and he dropped the bomb at the lodge. There was the pond in front of the lodge and the bomb dropped into the pond. The explosion emptied the pond, the mud, fish, and everything; everything was gone.”

“We moved to Prague. That was because of my mother’s sister, whose husband had died in the Prague revolution in May 1945. It was bad luck; he was the first victim of the Prague revolution. He was shot to death by SS men. He was employed at the train station in Prague-Vysočany and an armoured train stopped there on 5th May in the morning. People were painting over German signs and covering them and since my uncle came from Bílina and he could thus speak German, he tried to explain to the officer who got out of the train that the railway worker who was covering the German sign actually had a right to do it, because the revolution had started, and so on. They were all quite drunk and the SS man hit my uncle in his face and my uncle fought back and hit him, too, and the SS man pulled out his gun and riddled him with bullets. My uncle got about thirty bullets in his body. He stayed alive for about two days in the Bulovka hospital and then he died two days later.”