War seemed to be far away from Prague until it hit us directly.  Some planes were coming back from a bombing run and had leftover bombs that they dropped on us. I think the planes must have gone to bomb Škoda Works, which was the big industry in Czechoslovakia and had munitions factories. There was absolutely no warning. They just dropped them on Prague and it was a residential neighborhood. It was the Americans who did that. 

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I was sick in bed, Dedushka was doing his scholarly research at a library in a different part of town and Bobbi was out food shopping. I wanted boiled beef and cabbage and since I was sick she was roaming the city trying to find some meat. Meat was not easy to find. The fact that there was a butcher store in the neighborhood doesn’t mean that they had any meat. 

Suddenly the sirens started and I recognized the sound of airplanes descending. I knew this meant we were going to be bombed — I had enough experience with it. Just as I was getting up so I could run to the cellar, I was thrown down onto the bed by an explosion and covered by debris from head to foot. I had a few cuts from broken glass.

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After the noise stopped, I grabbed a suitcase (already packed for this type of emergency) and went to the cellar. Since I had been in bed I was not dressed. It was cool so I had a robe on or something. I didn’t have shoes on and I went barefoot all the way with the suitcase to the cellar. And I never cut my feet. It was like a miracle because of all the glass. When I got there other residents were already there helping each other out.

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There were many fires in our section of Prague. The civil defense people worked hard and was efficient in putting them out. I was just sitting and worrying about my parents when my mother suddenly appeared crying and screaming. She could hardly believe that I was alive — most of our street was destroyed. The house just next door was gone as was the house across the back yard, and some bomb fell on the street, so part of our building — just the front part — fell.

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When my mother saw all the rubble, she thought our house disappeared and she was just about ready to faint. She said people had to support her. Then she looked up and behind this pile of stones she saw our number and she realized that our house was standing. That’s when she came in and realized I was alive. 

My mother had taken the wrong trolley and ended up in part of the town that was not bombed. She had been so annoyed about the wrong trolley. Of course if she did take the right one who knows if she would have survived. 

There were two types of bombs. Those that exploded and those that started fires (incendiary bombs). I watched the civil defense go on our roof and bring several incendiary bombs down. They hadn’t ignited, so I was very, very lucky. 

When my father started coming home, he had no idea there was even a bombing —there was no alarm or anything. The planes appeared from nowhere. They were high up and they came down and just got rid of their surplus bombs before flying back. And he, of course, was upset. So we pulled ourselves together, we swept all the glass, and we got cardboard to cover the windows. We had tickets to a movie — in Prague you had to have tickets — so the three of us went off to a movie. We weren’t going to miss it. My mother said it would do us good. And that’s the way you lived there.

That bombing was the only bad bombing I experienced. Of course there were other bombings in Czechoslovakia. They did try to destroy the munitions factory. I never read up on it later to see what had happened.

Did the street have separate houses?

No it was a block of attached houses, but part of them fell down and part of them stayed. Dad and I saw the street, Manesova Street, when we were in Prague.