Libuše Heřmanská

* 1930

  • "When the occupation was going on, no public transport was going, I remember walking to the hospital in the morning, to work, I was working at the hospital in Vinohrady. And our ambulance was just going there, so they took me and I took a ride with them. We were on duty there practically round the clock, we had nothing to eat, so they sent somebody to bring loafs of bread. But it was horrible when they brought wounded people there. I remember they brought in some married couple who had both been shot in the legs. They [the Russians – trans.] were shooting here in Vinohrady, I don't know how they got shot. Well, they got out of it, of course, but they both had wounds in their legs, so they were treated. The surgical ambulance was running all the time because they kept bringing some wounded there. But in all, I don't think it was anything fatal. I guess they didn't carry the fatal ones. The ones they brought in were all treatable. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't a pretty time. We didn't know what was going to happen, what will happen. What they were going to do to us. It was such an uncertainty."

  • "When I got to the beginning of the street, I saw that half of our house was gone. That's where the bomb fell. I have a photograph of it here, that half of that house is gone. And it was only lucky that nobody was home because the house was completely demolished. And then we got some financial compensation, but when the communists came to power, we had to pay back the compensation. They said we were not socially disadvantaged, although my father was no longer alive, my mother had us, two children, but the communists said that it had to be paid back, so my mother actually paid back all the money and we paid it back. That was pretty cruel because people were getting compensation but we didn't really get anything."

  • "They behaved terribly in Mělník. For one thing, women ran away from them and shut themselves in because they were raping, really. And then what they did was that they fished in the Elbe by throwing grenades in. So, our opinion of the Soviet soldiers was not the best, and that's what stayed with me. I admit that."

  • "We weren't allowed to write to her, we weren't allowed to do anything. We had to wait for her to hear from her. And then she wrote to us that we could bring a parcel once a month, in Pankrác Prison they used to bring parcels like that. Because my father couldn't get out of the doctor’s office, I used to go there. I was the only young girl among those old women. Well, I felt bad because of it, but there was nothing to be done - a handsome but very sharp communist took the parcels there. And when he found out that I was there, he always stopped the whole queue, sat down on the table and started talking to me. How I'm doing, how I'm graduating, and I don't know what all. And the fact is, he always took my package. And when I was doing the maturita exam and I didn't go there, my father went there and he asked what was wrong with me, my father said, she's doing her maturita exam - he gave him the package back and said, until she comes, I'm not going to take it. And he gave him the package back. So, my dad came back completely shocked. Well, I was uncomfortable, but because I wanted my mom to get it, I went there."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 11.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:52:47
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I was at home when they came to arrest my mom

Libuše Heřmanská in Eye Direct studio, 2022
Libuše Heřmanská in Eye Direct studio, 2022
zdroj: Eye Direct

Libuše Heřmanská was born on 27 March 1930 to Libuše Šircová and Vladimír Širc in Mělník. Her father used to take Libuše to the hospital to see what his work was all about, because she aspired to become a doctor. Libuše‘s uncle, Josef Širc, was involved in the resistance and was imprisoned in Innsbruck until the end of the war. On May 9, 1945, during the celebrations of the end of the World War II, their family house in Mělník, Benešova Street, was hit by Soviet air force; fortunately, no one in the family died. However, the communist coup in 1948 brought many difficulties to the family, mother Libuše was imprisoned for a year in Pankrác Prison in Prague for unproven transportation of army general Alois Liška across the border. Because of the cadre‘s report, which was also contributed to by a classmate taking revenge for an amorous rejection, Libuše could not study at university. In 1950 she moved to Prague, where she trained as an X-ray technician. In the summer of 1957 she married Miroslav Heřmanský, a scientist and pianist, with whom she has two daughters. The couple did not take the opportunity to emigrate to England, where scientific colleagues would have found Miroslav Heřmanský a job. On the day of the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, the witness spent the day in a hospital where she treated wounded civilians. Libuše Heřmanská worked at the hospital until her retirement and lived in Vinohrady in Prague in 2022.