"He covered him (the body of dead Jan Masaryk) with newspapers so that I wouldn’t see him naked, and he called me to come to him. The assistant Tesař approached the body from the other side. My father had experience, he knew how people who fall from a window, or who get shot or whatnot, look like, and both of them exclaimed spontaneously: ´This is no suicide. A suicide doesn’t look like this!´ But the doctors, those responsible and appointed, claimed that it was a suicide, and already in the autopsy report, which was written during Jan Masaryk’s autopsy, they stated that there was conclusive evidence that this was a suicide. But my father kept insisting all the time that it could not have been a suicide. He had reasons for it. As far as I remember, he noticed that there were scratches on Masaryk’s hands. Father said that a man who jumps out of a window doesn’t try to hold onto the plaster facade. I don’t understand all this, but I remember this: Masaryk looked nice. I only saw his head and legs. His head was beautiful. There were no injuries, he hadn’t been shot in the head. I recognized him immediately. He was actually a handsome man."
"My name is Květoslava Neradová. I was born on April 9, 1933 in Prague. At that time, my parents didn’t live in Prague --they lived in Tachlovice, which is near Prague. My home is thus partly in that village to the West of Prague, and partly in Prague, or rather mostly in Prague."
"The time of advent was spent going to the Bartolomějská police station for interrogations by the StB. ´We know that you are capable... We know that you meet a lot of people...´ They knew perfectly well with whom I was meeting. I probably had a bug in my home, and many people were informing them about me, even the students. Of course I knew about it. They said: ´We don’t need information about the faculty from you, we have plenty of informers there, but we do need to get into the church, where you have wonderful contacts.´ This was their way of pressuring me."
"What my father was able to do and what he did do, was make an extra corpse out of several dead bodies. Thus he would put the extra German soldier into the mass grave in Ďáblice, and give the body of the person who was executed to his family."
"The paratroopers (their bodies) were kept in the forensic medicine institute for a long time." – "As a child, did you witness the operation in front of the Sts Cyril and Methodius Church on Charles Square?" – "We could hear it, and since I lived in Albertov, which was near, I naturally heard it, too. Even before that, we could hear German cars arriving there. One of our friends was involved in all this. He was a man who worked on the special handling of corpses together with my father. Just on the day when the Germans came there and when the paratroopers died, this man was supposed to save them. On that very day, he was supposed to come to the church with a funeral car and get them from the church alive. But when he was approaching the place, Resslova Street was already controlled by the Germans so he couldn’t get there anymore."
Květoslava Neradová, a professor, author, and radio journalist, was born April 9, 1933 in Prague. She grew up in Albertov, where she witnessed the atrocities committed during the Prague Uprising in 1945. „As if the people became possessed by the devil,“ she recalls the hatred of Czechs against their German neighbours, with whom they had lived peacefully throughout the war, and who had nothing in common with the Nazis. Květoslava was often ill when she was a little girl, and she remembers that she spent many winters in bed, when she read a lot to pass the time. Her literary education is truly impressive. She graduated from Czech and Russian at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. She focused on the baroque period, especially on texts by Bohuslav Balbín. When she was just 22 years old, in the early 1960s, she was already teaching old Czech literature at the university, and later she also added library science and history of culture. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s she was organizing secret lectures for students and meetings with writers and actors in her home, including several sessions with actor Jan Werich. Someone from among her students informed on her, and from 1970 onwards, she was arrested repeatedly by the Secret Police. The StB policemen exerted physical and mental pressure on her during interrogations which lasted many hours and for seven years they tried to force her into collaborating with them. Among other, they wanted her to inform upon dissidents who were meeting in the Christian community called Vigil (Vigilie), which she founded together with several students (Tomáš Halík, who later became a priest in the underground church, was one of them). She consistently refused collaboration with the StB. In 1977, shortly after the issue of Charter 77, which she helped to copy and disseminate, the Secret Police ordered her dismissal from the faculty. Her former students helped her to get a job in the State Library, where she worked with several intermissions until 1990. Apart from the secret lectures and organizing of many anti-state events she also helped to spread samizdat texts. After the Velvet revolution in 1989 she returned to the faculty of journalism, and she founded the Christian College of Media and Journalism. She died in 2016.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
