Doubravka commemorated the Allied bombing of April 1945

On Thursday, 17 April, Doubravka commemorated the 80th anniversary of the Allied air raid on Pilsen, which was the heaviest and most tragic of the entire Second World War. Over 200 bombers of the British Royal Air Force targeted the railway station on 17 January 1945, dropping nearly 900 tons of bombs, many of which landed on residential areas and killed hundreds of people. Commemorative acts were held at the memorials in Sousedská Street, Jateční třída and Habrmann Square.

The victims of the air raids are commemorated annually in the fourth district. "Today we jointly commemorated the victims of the Allied attack in three places. I am glad that among us was a direct participant of the bombing who came forward with his own testimony. Such personal memories are of great value to us - they give the events a concrete dimension and remind us that it was not so long ago," Tomáš Soukup, the mayor of the district, told the Czech News Agency.

Jindřich Fiala came to reminisce about perhaps the most terrifying night that turned his life upside down. When the bombs began falling on Doubravka just after 4 a.m. on April 17, 80 years ago, his family was in one room in a house in an emergency colony called Gypsy. The frantic family didn't have time to escape to a shelter. Daddy didn't want to go to the shelter, and then it was too late. The uncle, who ran to the shelter to hide, warned the family that the raid would be terrible. "And it was terrible. It was like a pipe burst, such a roar. You could hear it far away," Fiala told the Czech News Agency today. The raid caught him nine days before his fifth birthday.

The consequences were tragic for Fiala. "My dad went to hold the door, he was torn apart. Mum got a shrapnel in her head and died shortly afterwards," he said. His brother survived the raid by hiding under blankets and belongings in the corner of the room, and hiding himself under an overturned stretcher. "I was completely shocked when they pulled me out from under the stretcher. Few people wanted to believe that I had saved myself from under the necklaces," remarked the veteran.

After the death of his parents, his uncle became his guardian, but he began to deal with the depression of his war injuries and losses with alcohol. As an orphan, Fiala ended up in an orphanage. The memories of that terrifying night in mid-April 1945 came back to him for many years. “For a long time I woke up at night and dreamt that something big was falling on me,” said Fiala, who now lives in Příchovice in the southern Pilsen region.

According to a plaque commemorating the air raid in Jateční třída, more than 80 locals died in the shelter in the Cikánka colony, and the total number of victims of the air raid is estimated at more than 620, with some estimates reportedly as high as nearly 1,000 dead. The damage amounted to 111 million crowns at the time.

Lancaster aircraft dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on Pilsen, including 168 super-heavy bombs weighing 1,816 kilograms. Unexploded bombs from the raids are still sometimes found in the city during excavation work.

source of information: ČTK, photo: www.plzen.eu