Emil Fiala

"Specifically, my father said he was miraculously saved twice. In the artillery where he was stationed, initially eight people were manning the guns, they were big guns. Then there were six, and later the number got even more scarce. And that he had to go to the toilet twice. He went a little further away and by that time the gun had taken a full hit and everybody was dead. That happened to him twice, what a coincidence. That's fate, you say, isn't it? That he eventually came back..."

"We arrived home and horror. Everything was bombed out. Around us in Hoštice, five houses were affected. Fiala, Škrobánek, Fiala, Novák, on the other side Fichna, five or six houses. All this because the Soviets were firing Katyusha rifles at that time and one house after another was burned down. We were not there because we were hiding in the mountains, in Velká Štáhle. Only the outer walls remained, everything else was burnt. We arrived and it was a mess everywhere. It was horrible. The end of the war was terrible. When we arrived in Opava, the town was so destroyed. That's pretty much common knowledge. Everything was burnt down."