Jana Černá

* 1954

  • „We were happy, all of us, that the war is over, and the next day, it had to be the 10th, I saw Kája happily sitting on a tank in the Průběžná Street, they lived near the Průběžná St., he was among the soldiers. Then he came running home and said that he got a slice of bread with meat, that’s what grandma remembered. The weather was lovely those days and Kája would be at home at six every evening. And nobody would make him go out later. It was weird when he didn’t come until half past seven but it was undersrtandable. We thought he was somewhere with the soldiers but when he was not at home by eight, we went to look for him, we called, we searched until late but Karel was nowhere to be found. I had a bad feeling but I also hoped that he would return, that he would come back. We did not sleep that night at all and in the morning, we went to look for him again. In the afternoon, we found out that in Průběžná, an army car ran over a boy, and then we found his suspender with a name tag and then we knew that Kája was not any more. That was the second and even sadder day in my life. We found out that he was treated around seven in the evening in the Strašnice school. He was tossed aside by a Russian car and he broke his neck. He got some injection and died in half an hour. They took him to the Vinohrady hospital where dad, grandma’s husband, saw him. After the revolution, there were many dead and there was not enough space for burials and people to bury them. The dead were laid into common graves but we managed to get a spot in the Vinohrady cemetery and we dug the grave ourselves. It was so sad and so difficult… Jeník, the oldest son, helped dad with the digging. There was a shortage of coffins, too, children were buried in large boxes or only wrapped in a shroud. We bough a coffin far away at the Staroměstské Square, it was exhibited in the shop window as a sample. It was a nice coffin in oak. The burial mass took place in the St. Wenceslas chapel in Vinohrady at the Vinohrady cemetery on the 15th of May in 1945 at half past nine in the morning.”

  • „Five or six days after that 21st August, then all roads, streets, even in those larger towns and villages, were damaged by heavy traffic and flooded by Soviet vehicles and from time to time, there was some car and next to it, an unlucky guy in an uniform. A twenty-year-old boy who was supposed to guard idunnowhat. And because it was difficult to drive around them, they drove us to Votice to the train station. And there, on that train station, I don’t remember whether those were tanks, jeeps or those armoured cars, and there were soldiers with guns and that everything was to be checked. Whoever wanted to pass through the station building to the platforms, they had to show their IDs and such things and I remember that when we talked about it at home latrer, with that uncle and aunt whom I had been visiting, so, they said that somewhere on the road between Votice and Nosákov, we were somewhere there, they left one of those sad little soldiers to guard a tank or something, I don’t know, maybe that armoured car, and they left him there until he was starving. No water, no food, they forgot about him. They evidently forgot about him. And people spat on him and kicked him and only when he laid in the curb next to that road, someone took a pity at him and they brought him some water and bread and such things and started to ask where he was from and he said he was afraid of them and wanted to shoot but he did not have strength enough.”

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    Praha, 01.01.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:06:57
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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I did not know that it was my mum on that photograph

Jana Černá
Jana Černá
zdroj: archív pamětnice

Jana Černá was born on the 20th of May in 1954 in Prague. She was an only child, her parents raised her in Catholic faith but at the same time, she was subject to the political propaganda of the 1950’s and the 1960’s at school. The parents tried to protect her and almost isolated her from the outside world, they themselves kept away from anything happening outside their family. Her father became like this only after Jana was born, though. Only during the work on Jana’s story for the Memory of the Nations, some facts about her father Bartoloměj Černý came to light. During the Second World War, he was imprisoned in the Small Fortress in Terezín for a short time because he had escaped from the forced labour in one of arms factories in Germany. During the Prague Uprising, he took part in the fights and shortly after the liberation, he became a member of the First Emergency Batallion of the National Security which served in the troubled and somewhat dangerous borderlands. Jana’s mother, Anežka, was the subject of a famous photograph by an unknown photographer taken at the end of the WWII. A part of the memories of the Protectorate and the Prague Uprising is based on the family chronicle which was kept by Jana’s grandmother. For all her life, Jana has taught dance and piano. She is divorced, she raised two children and at the time of recording in 2023, she lived in Prague.