Hana Vrbická

"Dad had a sister and she was married. And her husband was in that concentration camp. He was in Dachau and stayed there for six whole years because they made him burn dead people. And since no one could or wanted to do it, had no access to it, he stayed there for six whole years. And I remember after the war, we lived on the ground floor, someone called my mother: Boženka!' So my mother looked out with me, I was a curious child. There was someone standing out there, whom we didn't recognize at all. And he says, 'You don't recognize me? I am Bohouš.' His name was Bohouš Štěpánek. And he didn't have a single tooth, almost no hair on his head, but mainly there were scars from how he was probably treated in that concentration camp."

"On Palm Sunday, it was in 1945, it was the biggest air raid I experienced. It was high noon, my mother was cooking dumplings on the stove at home, like today I see them jumping around. And the sirens blared in such an acute tone; the acute sirens they were. And the normal raid was only slightly interrupted. But this acute meant fast, go fast. And suddenly we heard a terrible bang, we said, right at midday; there was much loud banging and the sun that was shining was quite nice, probably with the dust that flew up, it was obscured and it was as dark as midnight. Suddenly, at high noon, it was dark, really pitch black, so that you couldn't see anything at all. That's what we learned at the time, bomber planes flew to Vysočany, to the factories. But allegedly they got it wrong and bombed Střížkov instead."

"In the office where we counted delivery notes, I had a colleague, such a small person, he was a Spaniard, his name was Francisco Arias de Sanchez. And once it happened that two gentlemen in leather coats came and took that Francisco away. They found out that he did work there, but he still had some connections, but in short, he was doing something against the communists. So they took him away, we all wondered what happened, we only found out later. And after some time, maybe two to three months, a postcard came. And I was picking up the mail for the boss I was sitting next to, and I said: 'Mr. Vrba, there is a postcard from Francisco.' And I waved it around like this, and suddenly a communist was walking past, took it and said: ´ Do not wave it. No one must know that.' He probably managed to escape and sent us a postcard; I don't know from which foreign country."