Josef Urban

“My mother was doing laundry, and I was sitting on the step that led to the balcony. A drunk Russian soldier came upstairs. She had her back turned to him. We had a bench where my father had cut the legs shorter so the washtub would sit level on the slope. He came up and started rubbing himself against my mom. She shoved him away—she wasn’t one to take things lightly. But he came back again. I can still see it clearly—she was wringing out a bedsheet, said something to him, then hit him with the sheet, and he fell. He wasn’t very big. He picked himself up and left. They were camped down in the park. Two hours later, two officers came. One of them spoke a little Czech, and my mother was able to talk to him. They said they hadn’t slept for several days and needed somewhere to rest, preferably near children—some safe place. One was a young captain. So I went to ask our neighbor—her husband was away in the military and she had two kids, and a big apartment—if they could sleep there. She said she’d go stay with her parents upstairs. They slept there for a long time, the whole day. Afterwards, my mother told them about the Russian soldier who had harassed her. They said she should’ve come down [to the camp] right away—that he had no right to do that. This was the second wave—these ones were better. The first ones were worse.”

"My father always told me to try to get home. Let it kill us all. I didn't know anything about the air raids then, it was the first time on December 16 when they dropped some bombs here. When it flew from the bridge and they were shot at in Střekov. It was so under a cloud that you couldn't see the planes. When they blew the horn, we had a classroom on the ground floor, I opened the window, threw my bag out and ran. You have to run down the middle of the street because there were CO people standing in the doorway, luftschutz, they had a blue helmet. They were screaming and I ran down the middle of the street, I was scared as hell. Behind the waterworks, behind the old railway bridge, I ran into the park so I wouldn't have to pass the houses. I ran through the barriers, there were barriers where the viaduct is now, I ran up there and I ran through the sugar mill, through the apartment building, and in that swing, the cinch on my bag came out. I stopped, put it on and started running again. There was this quarry and in the quarry was the door to the house, now there's a garage. I ran to the corner and a bomb fell in the other corner. And the pressure wave knocked the door right out from under me. I think I was screaming, I don't know. Rocks started falling, I was under that door. When it stopped, the gate was lifted up and my mother was standing there. The gate didn't pin me down because there was a pile of coal next to me."