Jitka Jágrová

* 1939

  • „Back then, we were in the fourth grade and one Mr. Vrba was our teacher. And Mr. Vrba, before the school year ended, got into troubles because he let us share our memories about the 5th of May uprising. And some children said that they [the Russians] stole them watches and such things. And the children talk about it at home, that’s what I found out when I had debates with schoolchildren. So the children talked about it at home and one mother, one such very devoted to the [Communist] régime, she had a boyfriend, or she lived with him, who was at the district [administration]. She told him whether it was right. And they made a ruckus about it, that Mr. Vrba allowed the children to talk about those htings. And now, they took him to the court and had us, the children, as witnesses. I remember it as if it was today how my mother gave me a pep talk about what I can say and what I can’t say. The children don’t have an idea, they don’t get the feel so they are puzzled by such situations and I was all nervous about it.”

  • „It was just a few days before the end of the war and they were fighting for Prague. Simply, the Vlasov army was advancing somewhere to the west. Maybe they thought they would help with liberation of Prague. So, they moved to that village, so that they could go and defend Prague. So it had to be at the time of the Prague Uprising. In the countryside, there was no shortage of food and the people were pretty generous. And they were staying where we were staying with that farmer. And our mom spoke a bit of Russian, at the business academy, she had taken it as an optional class. So she did a bit of interpreting. And someone, when he saw me, he said: Oh, I have such a little girl back home and I will never see her again. And she said: It’s the end of the war, you will see her again. And he said: No, I am an officer, they will shoot us all, that won’t happen.”

  • „They threw two types of bombs, fragmentation and incendiary. And that incendiary bomb, because we lived on the third floor, there was just the attic above us, it hung in the living room, which was my mother’s pride. It got stuck in the ceiling, and it was partly released, not entirely. I remember it as if it was today, it was giving off such sparks, it was like sparklers on the Christmas tree, I thought. It destroyed the living room, I think the curtains caught fire but there was no more fire. Dad and the maintenance guy somehow extracted it and deactivated it. Dad had been at work. When he’d been returning, he came back totally aghast. The insurance company was at Poříčí, it was normal there. But he said that as he had been coming closer, he had seen it was getting worse. He had wondered whether he would find our house still standing.“

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Liberec, 15.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:09:11
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

After an air raid, she saw houses cut in half. A bomb hung off the ceiling like a sparkler.

Jitka and her parents, Marie and Edvard, in Prague in 1943
Jitka and her parents, Marie and Edvard, in Prague in 1943
zdroj: Archiv pamětnice

Jitka Jágrová, née Sedláčková, was born on the 7th of November in 1939 in Prague. She grew up in the Vinohrady neighbourhood where she witnessed the destructive air raids of the Allied forces in February 1945. This was the reason why she and her parents moved to her uncle’s to Beroun where she experienced further air raids at the very end of the war. Then, they lived at a farm in Koněprusy for a short time and the Vlasov army soldiers were staying there as well. Jitka’s father worked in an insurance company in Prague as a clerk and when the insurance companies were nationalised and closed down at the beginning of 1949, the family moved to Liberec and their standard of living plummeted. Jitka attended secondary school and university in Liberec. With her first husband, they worked in the TOS foundry in Kuřim but when their first child was born, they moved back to Liberec. During the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies in 1968, she and her husband were in France. She worked at the Liberec univrsity at the department of mechanics, strength and elasticity under, among others, Professor Cyril Höschl [note: not the same person as the well-known professor of psychiatry of the same name]. After the velvet revolution, she and her second husband, Jaroslav Jágr, they were among those who established the Civic Forum. She worked at the university for almost half of a century. In 2022, she and her husband lived in Liberec.