Jiří Šigut

"Then we lived to see the liberation. On 25 April, when the Russians came, we lived in the cellar - like Maňka, we were hiding there. I was there with my mother and my sister, my sister and her husband, and they had a little baby, three months old. And that's where the first Russian came to greet us. It was very emotional. They called out, ‚Češi? Češi? Češi? German niet?‘ They were looking for Germans. That was our first encounter with the Russian army. Then the next wave of Russians came, and there was already a call: 'Davay tchasy! (Give me the watch)' My brother-in-law had an English watch and they took it away. But right after the liberation I got involved in the reconstruction of the city. The Russians started to build bridges over the Svratka River, because they were all blown up. For about a week I worked on the bridge by Milosrdných bratří, where we built a makeshift wooden bridge from beams. Then I moved to another workplace - to Černovice, to the bridge over the Svratka, where I also helped."

"There was a rumour at the time that a sugar factory was burning in Sokolnice and that everyone could pick up as much sugar as they wanted. So my friend and I took a cart and drove from Židenice through Černovice and Komárov to Tuřany. In Tuřany we met German soldiers who were retreating, and we went against them towards the sugar factory. At that moment, Russian planes started attacking the Germans. We ducked into a ditch and I could just hear the machine gun rounds whizzing past us. They were shooting at the Germans, but luckily we escaped. That was my first, actually second encounter with death - it was really about metres. And we, stupid boys, continued on despite the experience. We came to a viaduct over which the Russians were already making artillery preparations. Russian shells were flying over the trees. But we were lucky - at the viaduct, where today there is a big substation, someone had been probably also going to Sokolnice to get sugar. But he didn't have time to take it, he just loaded it up and then had to run away, so he spilled a pile of raw sugar on the road. We scooped it into bags and took three bags of the yellow raw sugar. When we were walking back, we caught the air battle again in Tuřany. A Russian plane crashed there and we passed right by it. But in the end we arrived in Židenice with a bag of sugar and with great glory."