Jiří Hemzal

“My daddy moved down the basement and we lived – there was such a small cellar in the house - in a small cellar. We slept there I think almost 14 days to three weeks down there. But a week before the front came here, on the 25th the mortar cannons with the heavy shooting, the mortars falling down on the house. There was a two-meter hole in the roof. One fell in our garden. And then on the 26th suddenly all became so quiet. There were no big shooting, just an occasional gunshot. And my dad went to the door to see what was going on. Well, then he rushed back crying: ´The Russians are here already, come and have a look.´ There were about five or six Russian soldiers here with machine guns, shooting back there, because the Germans were fleeing uphill, so they shooting on them. They had cannon here that they always leaned on the sidewalk and made a large bang. Here the Germans let the people build the barricades, and so they shot the barricade and always as the cannon was not buried down in the ground, and the power of the explosion had no space to go off, it always moved by two or three meters, so they rearranged it again, leaned back on the sidewalk, charged, and shot again. So they destroyed the whole barricade. And then they shot at Dolní Žabovřesky.”

“During school I experienced two heavy raids. The first one was sometime in July, and we were previously summoned to work in the cooperative Včela. I witnessed it down the cellar at Družstevní Street, and we saw how American aircraft flew right from Líšeň and how they separate the bombs throwing them down the ground. Immediately we ran into the shelter and in a few seconds there were huge explosions. In the basement we felt as if the cellar was bursting, that the walls and the floor were moving. And that made us do it - there were about twenty to thirty people alltogether - we were all down on our knees and praying. We survived quite well; after the raid we went to see the damages, because it was the first air raid that Brno had ever experienced. We have always believed that, because we are against the Germans, we would not be bombarded. But it was a mistake because the arms and factories were full and practically supported the Germans in the fight for a long time. I did not witness the second air raid directly in the city, as we fled from work at ten o'clock and got home and there was an enormous rumble at about eleven o'clock. And we knew that it was not the thunder that we were used to hear on Fridays, when Americans bombarded down Austria and Vienna, but that the earth was shaking right here. This meant that there was a huge raid in the centre of Brno. Those Americans always had bad luck that they rarely hit the factory during the two big raids. It has always been blasted down at civilian and civil houses, sometimes killed people in the streets, unless they were hiding. The last big air raid... I was coming back from work in the afternoon and in the street from the centre of the town, from the Svoboda Square, most of the houses were destroyed, a lot of them were just burnt ruins; it was just that horrible episode of war.”