Jana Honomichlová

* 1949

  • "It was like a village there, more like a hamlet, so buses only used to go to the Škoda factory in the morning, at six o'clock down our street with the Škoda workers, and then picked them up when the shift was over. So there were no cars going there, only some trucks from Škoda, but they didn't go in the afternoon. So we'd come home from school, throw away the schoolbag and we'd immediately be on the street. Up by the Sokol Hall, because it was actually a hill, we used sledge, boys rode a snow sledge, somebody skied, but not much. I still remember that the gate to the Škoda factory used to be two streets down, so it was really maybe three quarters of a kilometre long slide. Then, I don't know what year, they moved the gate, because the Škoda factory started to expand, all the way down to Strojní Street at the People´s House."

  • "In the fifty-third year, I remember - my dad didn't want to talk about it too much - but that there was a demonstration in Masaryk Square, that he went there to see it with his colleagues, that things were starting to turn out badly, so he left. The only thing I remember is that afterwards such actions were announced so that the intellectuals would go to help the workers at the Škoda factory. Dad was assigned somewhere in Škoda, I don't know where. The only thing that saved him - because they were taking some badly secured bars somewhere by crane and those fell on his leg, so he had all his toes broken. That rescued him from having to work at Škoda as a labourer."

  • "Well, it was actually my mother's aunt, her son completed his apprenticeship at the Baťa [company] and was sent to Trinidad to represent the company there. And when the war broke out he left that country and joined the RAF, then as a lieutenant he was deployed on some secret mission to Italy and unfortunately the plane hit rocks in the fog and the plane crashed. He was about 27, my aunt had a mental breakdown at the time and she had mental problems all her life because he was her only son. And she died pretty soon, sometime after the year 1950."

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Children from Karlov used to sledge from the Sokol Hall to the gate of the Škoda factory

Jana Honomichlová, 1960s
Jana Honomichlová, 1960s
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Jana Honomichlová, née Šantorová, was born on 8 November 1949 in the now vanished Karlov quarter of Pilsen. Part of this workers‘ settlement, including the school, ceased to exist during the Allied air raids at the end of the war. The witness knew these events only from her parents‘ stories, but she remembers the adventure of discovering the bunkers that remained there after the war. She describes the sporting and cultural background of the quarter, whose social life took place in the local Sokol Hall, at the People‘s House or the football field. After graduating from secondary technical engineering school, Jana Honomichlová was assigned to work in the Škoda factory. After her marriage in 1973, she moved away from Karlov, but she would return there to see her parents and also to work in the so-called designers‘ houses. At the time of recording in 2023, she was living with her family in Pilsen.