Jarmila Dvořáková

“When the Germans conquered Paris and got inside the broadcast, they found a letter from my mom. Thus she was invited in October 1942 to the Petschek palace. My mom only managed to scribble on the table for my dad the following message: ‘They’re taking me to Pečkárna, I'll be back in the afternoon’. But she wasn’t. They arrested her and took her to Waldheim in Berlin. She was by then already shortly pregnant. I should have been born in May 1943, but probably due to the situation and the circumstances in which my mom had to live in prison, I was born already in April.”

“Ruda took me in his arms and went with me into the woods, where he told me that we did not have a father anymore. He told me that we had to be strong and should support my mom. The fact is that my father had angina pectoris, so his heart was a little sick, but I’m convinced that it was the Communists who killed him. The system, the regime, the Communists. They are responsible.”

“An StB agent came and said that these people needed to be lodged in these rooms because these were wiretapped. But because they were our friends, we took them aside and told them that these rooms were bugged. We told them to be careful when speaking in these rooms.”

“The café had large windows on the Wenceslas Square, so we would watch all historical events through these windows from the café. I know that I was sitting on the coffee table and was watching what was going on outside. I remember that in September the funeral of Edvard Beneš took place. I did not understand much of it at that time and everybody was crying, down in the street and around me, everybody was crying. I was terribly ashamed not to be crying. So I like spit on my finger and would touch my eyelids with it, so that my eyes too were wet...”