Růžena Horáková

“We were on the main street, and then air raid and off went the sirens. So we rushed into the tallest building there was, because we reckoned: ‘They’ll blow up the top floors, the lower ones might survive.’ So we rushed inside and there was a bomb shelter there, but there was an antechamber in front of it. The shelter was already closed and we got into the antechamber. There were some nuns there and us two girls who had rushed in. Suddenly silence, we said: ‘Well hopefully it will be okay and nothing will happen.’ But on the contrary, the plaster started crumbling, I said: ‘Oh dear.’ The house got a hit from the side like this. Such a deathly calm, you couldn’t even imagine, maybe in some sealed chamber. So we were there, we couldn’t get out, we were buried under the rubble. They only said they found us, I don’t know how many hours it took them, but they got us out of there.”

(Q: “What did the food stamps contain, what could you get for them?”) “Not much. They gave us artificial honey, margarine, no butter, no lard either. Only the small children had a ration of butter. Twenty decagrammes of vegetables a week, some bread - I don’t know how much, but I know we had three thin slices a day to begin with, and even less afterwards. Do you know what we did during the war? We drove to the fields outside of Vienna, we gathered ears and ground the grain in a poppy-seed grinder, and then we made pancakes of a sort. The bread crumbled, because they said it contained chestnuts - it contained all sorts of things. Or fruit, when it was the time for wild cherries, then hurrah off outside Vienna to pick them. Those wild cherries, that was a lot of work, we preserved them so that we at least had some jam. Or plums, we went to pick plums and we made plum jam. There wasn’t anything to put on the bread, so we used everything we could find.”