Jarmila Omesová

"They found 360 bullets in our kitchen at the time, and they went through and stayed there. It was everywhere. We had a cot in the kitchen because I had a brother who was three quarters of a year old and he used to sleep there. And when we were still in that basement, really, from what I know, it was just horror and terror. The horse, the wounds... And we didn't know what was going on. My older brother, God, he just said, 'Mom, please make it stop. Tell baby Jesus (Santa) to make it stop. I'm gonna eat my soup.' He didn't like it. And nothing happened, unfortunately. I don't know how my mother kept my 9 months old brother from crying because he would have really given us away. And that was the end of it. And through our house, because there was shooting from all sides, a commando stormed in - some six or seven Germans, I think. And they were shouting, 'Where are the Czech dogs?!' Because they thought that they were shooting from us on the road."

"The whole wall was papered over and the door didn't have a door frame, so it was just a wooden plank door, opened with a key and completely flush so you couldn't see it. And maybe that saved us. When our parents hid in the cellar, Mr. Havlík, the gamekeeper, who had just come to the shop to buy something, got there with them and saw that he couldn't get home, that he couldn't go home anymore, so he was with us in the cellar all the time. So we somehow survived the ninth till the evening. At night we heard shooting, sometimes horses trotting, sometimes a car ran over. And during the shooting, they shot a horse. But the horse fell right by the window to our cellar. The window was covered by the bollards from the sidewalks, so you couldn't really see, you couldn't tell that there was a window. And the horse fell in there and was actually finishing up. He was pounding his hooves and neighing or... I can't tell, but I still think the horse was crying, the horse was crying... until he really finished."

"We survived in there. Then my parents started to smell smoke, so my dad slowly opened the door. The door to the basement was in a small hall where there were four other doors. The smoke was coming from the kitchen; it was on fire because the cot caught fire when the Germans threw grenades inide. There were blankets in the cot. It's here in this photograph. The cot was completely shot through, and my parents found 360 bullets in the kitchen cleaning up on the afternoon on 10 May. My mum heard the word 'khorosho' around noon on 10 May and knew it was Russian, so only then my father cautiously peeked out of the cellar to see what was going on. There were Russian cars driving by, and so they came out of the cellar. I've always been a belligerent child, so I took a wooden spoon - the little stick in my hand - I went to get the Germans. I had the doll with me in the cellar, I kept telling her, 'Don't cry, it's going to be okay again.' We survived, thank God. In fact we like to say that day was our second birthday, because if they had found us in that cellar, they probably would have shot us."