Dagmar Čondlová

* 1956

  • "I remember that the way home was terrible, I thought... that the military cars and tanks would knock us off the road, because at that time there was no highway to Pilsen yet. They drove through districts that were relatively narrow and the military cars were wide, and avoiding them was really difficult job. Sometimes we had to keep standing for half an hour before the whole convoy of cars passed, then we could continue our journey. But when we got home, it was a very nice meeting, that we were all together, knowing that nothing happened to anyone."

  • "When I woke up on the morning of August 21, I heard a terrible noise, I still hear it, ‘Citizens, keep calm! Citizens, keep calm! Citizens, there is no war, but the Allied armies have come to free us! ‘And I was very surprised, as I was terribly afraid of what was happening. But I had a feeling that the boys were watching a movie on TV, it never occurred to me that it was real, so I - because I slept alone in the room - I climbed out and asked, 'Guys, what are you looking at in the morning? Just like TV? After all, we have to play tennis! 'And they said to me,' The war has started. Come look out the window, there are tanks and the war has started. 'Well, I was crying at that moment, I was shaking all over. And really, there were some armed cars, tanks in the streets under the windows, and it was just a terrible experience."

  • "I didn't believe at all that the water could get to our house. My parents lived next door, right next to me, and they said that the water would definitely not reach so high, and they refused to leave the apartment. And the next morning I saw that the water really had to be in the apartment, that it was already quite high and there were firefighters on the boat... So reached out to them in order to save my parents. They had to take a boat here through the manor garden that is associated with our gardens. They had to cut the fence to get there at last, but in the end they got them out on a boat."

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    Praha-Zbraslav, 04.11.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 59:30
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
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They told me the war had just begun

Dagmar Čondlová in 1968
Dagmar Čondlová in 1968
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Dagmar Čondlová was born on July 1, 1956 in Prague. She has lived in Zbraslav all her life. She and her brother both played tennis and on August 20, 1968, they went to Pilsen for a match. The father left them there together with his cousins in the relatives‘ apartment alone. The children woke up in the morning to find that there were tanks of the occupying armies in the streets. They thought the war had begun. In the evening, their father came to fetch them and they took a long journey to Prague, where they avoided passing columns of tanks. Dagmar got married and had three children. Their house in Zbraslav was badly damaged during floods in 2002.