Erich Veselý

"Russian soldiers were stationed here in the house. In the passage there was already a Studebaker, an American car, and on it were mounted the katyusha, or those 'Stalin organs'. The missiles flew towards Myšárna [Monks' Mountain], the field where the houses now stand. There was a field opposite, so they shot there. There was this huge box on the car and it was full of sardine boxes. So I, when the guard wasn't there, stole the sardines. How many years I used to pull them off the nightstand in my bedroom by the bed. It was lined with these Portuguese sardines. "They picked the stock somewhere and I stole the sardines."

"I think it was Thursday, when the first soldiers came across the street from where my aunt lived. So they banged on the door. Otherwise, before that they were shooting in the direction of Bráfova Street, as today the tram goes from Kamenný mlýn towards Žabovřesky. There was a former factory there, called Erdálka, where they used to make cleaning products. Then it was apartments for poor people. From here the tanks fired into Jundrovo. Some houses in Jundrovo were bombed. We watched it from Háječek, above today's playground, where a friend had a shelter dug in the woods. From there we could see from that forest when the Russians were shooting at Jundrov. When I was at home and the Russians came, I called my father. My father had boarded up all the windows in the house. Across the garden there were some Germans lying in a trench with armoured fists. My father told them to leave, that they would break his house. He spoke perfect German. So they were in our yard, drinking water at the well, and my father was cutting them the bread my mother always made. That's what the German soldiers ate. There were five young boys. They drank the water, ate the bread, and then they said goodbye and left, left the trenches. Well, the Russians, when I saw them, I called my father into the corridor where there were these little original windows, and my father, when he looked, his first words were, 'They're going to free us from everything. Nothing good will come of them.'"

"For war production we made base casings for artillery shells, or for the grenade. And then we made what we called hydraulics for submarines, various cast steel-alloy parts, all the fittings that were for the hydraulics in the submarine. That was all made by us. I was actually involved in that production, whatever it was. What was made was all war production."