Premature celebration

Luděk Dembovský was fifteen years old when the Third Army liberated Plzeň on 6 May 1945. One of his memories of the day involves St Bartholomew’s Cathedral at Náměstí Republiky. “There is a gallery on the church tower, about sixty metres above the ground, with a beautiful view. When the square was full of people welcoming the Americans, an SS man started shooting from the gallery. People disappeared in an instant and the soldiers in a tank pointed the gun barrel towards the church tower. The Nazi just had some simple gun and luckily he got scared. The Americans got him down and arrested him. The feast went on after that,” Luděk Dembovský recalls.