Věra Kazdová

* 1921

  • „Here it is, 1930, that’s when [the president] Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk turned 80. The Vladislav Hall [at the Prague Castle] was full of presents. There were stunning embroideries from the Slovaks and what I found fascinating – I still remember it -, the Baťa company made white boots for him. The times of the First Republic, there were all sorts of things. There were street organs, you cannot remember this, the organ grinders used to perform by the cemetery entrances. Then there were tinkers, Slovaks, they used to go from door to door and they would repair stoneware and pots with wire. Or those Slovak women, they sold handmade curtains and all sorts of table settings. And I have to say, even my mom and grandma bought some from them. They would go from door to door all over Prague, at that time, I lived in the Mrázovka area, on the third floor, it was a huge block of flat in the Smíchov neighbourhood, it does not exist any more. The Ringhoffer factories [and the blocks of flats], they all belonged to Count Ringhoffer, my parents had their own bathroom there. In 1921! It was a bathroom and it served as a kitchen, too. But there was a bathtub with that column in which water was heated. Or, at the butcher’s, I loved it there, the butcher had sausages, such tiny sausages, and he would say: ‘Would your granddaughter have one?’ And grandma, that, yes. Small sausage, a bit of mustard and such a small tasty bread roll. When we went to buy meat, I would get this snack. I still remember all these things.”

  • "I was born in 1921 and I remember the anniversary of St. Wenceslas, it was thousand years. Between the Jirásek bridge and Palacký quay, they drove a gun carriage on which there was a glass case with the skull of Saint Wenceslas with a gold crown. They were taking it to Vyšehrad."

  • „I had a job in Jungmannova St. in a dressmaker’s and at midday, I could go home for lunch. So I went to Mrázovka in Smíchov to my grandma’s to have my lunch. I was returning across the Palacký’s bridge and the tram rode along the quay, not to that street where the church of saints Constantin and Methodius is, Resslova street. I was puzzled. I saw many German soldiers. And later on, I learned that I rode the tram exactly at the time when Gabčík and the other guy were found out and they had to shoot themselves. At such a horrible time I went on the tram.“

  • „On the 23rd September 1938, the mobilisation of the army was announced. It was a great disappointment, that’s what I remember. Our relatives were coming to Prague hoping that we would go to war and defend ourselves against the Germans who already started an offensive. And then it was a great disappointment when [President] Beneš eventually said that we would not fight back. This decision is disputed and it’s said that the hindsight is always 20/20 but I think that we should go for it. They worried that we were a small nation but Germans had even less compared to us, they stole all the arms and guns from us. And they had nothing at the end.”

  • "Crowds had already gathered at the Plzeňská street, people were waving Czech and American flags and they expected that the American army will come from Plzeň to liberate us. So we stood there in hopeful expectation. We were there only for a while and then airplanes started flying overhead and the Germans started to fire at us. People disappeared from the street and we returned to grandma§s place. The day after, it started to rain and people were building barricades. We did not have anything with us, aunt gave us some old coats and we were pulling those large cobblestones and handing them over to the barricades. People even dragged a locomotive from a factory, to the Plzeňská street. People wanted to welcome the Americans and at the end, they were building a barricade.”

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    Praha, 22.04.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:58:49
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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I lived a whole century. I appreciated most T. G. Masaryk and Václav Havel

Věra Kazdová in 1939
Věra Kazdová in 1939
zdroj: pamětnice

Věra Kazdová, née Pavlíková, was born on the 9th of June in 1921 in the Prague neighbourhood of Smíchov to the family of Antonie and Hynek Pavlík. Her father was a construction engineer, her mother had attended Business Academy and before the children were born, she worked as a secretary in a law firm. Věra had a sister younger by three years, Libuše. At the time of recording her memories, Věra Kazdová was 100 years old. She vividly described her childhood during the First Republic, the moods and events of the Protectorate or how she witnessed the events of the 1968 occupation. She grew up in the Prague neighbourhoods of Smíchov and Vysočany, for some time, she lived in Slané. Her family were active members of the Sokol gymnastics club, they knew several Sokols from Vysočany who were executed by the Nazis. In 1932, when she was 11, she participated in the Sokol mass gymnastics festival. In 1939, she graduated from the school for ladies’ vocations and then she worked as a seamstress in a dressmaking workshop. She remembers air raids in Prague and how she helped to build barricades in the Smíchov neighbourhood during the liberation fighting. In 1947, she married to a law student, Miroslav Kazda. Throughout her life, she held various clerical jobs in Pražské komunikace [Prague communication, road maintenance company], Pražské lázně [Prague Baths] and the Tesla company. She recalls her onetime superior, Adolf Burger, a former Jewish prisoner whom the Nazis forced to forge banknotes in the so-called „Devil’s workshop“. She was never active in politics as she concetrated on her private life.