Ludmila Sýkorová

* 1936

  • “One of those days Dad supposedly agreed to meet up with my brother in Old Town Square, on the corner of Železná Street. They were to meet at thirteen oh-oh, that is, at one in the afternoon. Our family is quite well known for its tardiness, and the fact that my brother came late saved his life... Dad actually came there early: he was walking along from the direction of Rott’s, and it seemed strange to him that the place where he was to meet with his son was strangely full of milling SS men. So he hid and just watched the place from a distance. And supposedly, at precisely one o’clock, they took up machine guns and shot all the people who were there. Dad ran there, terribly afraid that he’d find his son there, but [my brother] was only just coming up from Tyl Theatre at the time. He’d heard the gunfire, so he also hid in one of the houses there, and when things were quiet, he went to Old Town Square.”

  • “One day, a soldier came to us. He started hugging Mum, and I was awfully afraid that that stranger - as I saw him - that soldier might hurt Mum. I hid into a corner, trembling, terrified... Who is that soldier that’s walking around our flat with such confidence?! I didn’t recognise that it was Dad who’d returned from the mobilisation... The image stayed with me my whole life, I could describe exactly what that military uniform looked like.”

  • “Mum used to joke about it. She was ill as a child, there weren’t any pills back then, right... Penicillin, antibiotics, and various other types of medicine... She went through all the infectious children’s diseases, but usually it was two at a time. It was a miracle that she’d survived. The doctors always told her mother: ‘Anything can happen, I’ll come again tomorrow, but prepare for all eventualities.’ And my mother wondered: ‘What is Mum supposed to prepare for?’ The next day, when a smiling mummy opened the door for the doctor, straight in the doorway he’d say? ‘We’ll be okay. She survived the night.’ Apparently, that happened several times in her childhood, and so she’d say: ‘I escaped the gravedigger’s spade so many times that they’d already ticked me off the list up there, and now they’ve forgotten about me.”

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    Praha, byt pamětnice, 24.11.2015

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Nobody was allowed to touch Dad’s radio. Now I was finally able to build my own one

Ludmila Sýkorová
Ludmila Sýkorová

Ludmila Sýkorová, née Drahozalová, was born on 6 April 1936 in Prague. Her father was involved in the Prague Revolt, he fought in Horní Krčská and Pankrác. The events following the Communist coup in 1948 did not favour Ludmila‘s family. Her father was fired from work because he was a high-ranking member of the National Socialist Party, and her brother was sent to the correctional camp in Kladno because they had found an entry in his diary regarding the death of Jan Masaryk. Ludmila attended a girls‘ grammar school; she then graduated from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University, specialising in RTF (radio-television-film). It was there that she met her future husband. After school she wanted to work for Czechoslovak Radio, but she did not have the Party credentials to do so. And so she eventually found employment at the Research Institute of Telecommunication Technology (VÚST). She participated in many interesting projects: for example, she developed a communication device in the Ostrava mines. In August 1968 the Institute‘s building was transformed into an improvised television studio, and its employees helped enable the broadcasting of Czechoslovak Television during the occupation. She now (2016) lives in Prague.