Danuše Kupfová

"My dad was a fire chief; they used to call us on the phone to report air hazards. Then the sirens would blare, or when the planes didn't crash, they didn't blare. But we always knew by phone, so we were always awake. I haven't slept well since. But before that last raid, they didn't phone us; the sirens just blared acute danger, in quick succession. And we could already hear the planes and the bangs. We ran out. My mother always had her suitcase packed with papers and precious things. We ran to the cellars under the cooking room, the lights were out, and we had torches and candles. Then Daddy came in and said, 'We got hit.' He left, and when he came back, he said, 'We're on fire.' Daddy kept rabbits, chickens and pigeons on the patio. The pigeons were flying out of the pigeon coop and burning in the air..."

"Before the war, from the time I was three years old, we lived where the visitor centre is today. There was a complex of buildings called the Old Malt House. It doesn't exist today; the current Old Maltings is the newer one. And the Old Malt House had a dwelling house, and underneath the house were areas where the maltsters would shuffle the grain with wooden shovels, and they would check the temperature, and they had rooms, chalets, where they could sleep. We lived on the first floor, my father was first the maltster, then the head maltster and finally the brewer. His office was in the hall. Because the flat was so big, we had a gentleman, nowadays you would say a servant, who cleaned, washed our windows, brought us heating, although there was already central heating in several rooms. We went through the bathroom to the pantry. There were other rooms for the workers and then the room where the Wehrmacht's gruppenführer had his office when the Germans came."