Who will come first?

At the end of the war, Oldřich Babka was twenty years old and a direct witness of the events in his native Plzeň in May 1945. Instructed by his friend, the resistance member Karel Šindler, he and three friends guarded a house in the area of the current Štruncovy Sady where a trophy radio was hidden. The guardians of the radio which Šindler later used to broadcast the “Free Plzeň Calling” declaration listened to the sound of shots coming across the river from the brewery and worried if the Nazis would come. Instead, the Americans came in an armoured vehicle: “They stopped near the brewery and turned the tank turret towards it. We watched them from Štruncovy Sady, about a hundred metres away, hiding behind a ridge. We didn’t feel like heroes because there was still shooting in the city and in the brewery. If the Nazis came instead of the Americans, they would beat us to death.”