Mgr. Klára Blažejová

“Hello, my name is Klára Blažejová. I was born in 1924 and I’ve come here to share some of memories about my life. You know, truth is a relative notion and we all have our own truth. Just a small example – today I will say that I’m cold, you can say you’re feeling hot. You are right, I am right. So the perspective a person uses when looking at what happened goes always through this filter, and this concerns not only the period of time but also the environment from which the person came. My father was an engineer, my mother was a lawyer, I was the only child. So, using later terminology, I was a member of a bourgeois family. A family that didn’t consist of manual workers and wasn’t deemed socialist by the people in power then. Because I was alone and my parents were wealthy I could spend my time doing sports. I enjoyed figure skating and later I worked as a figure skating instructor for twenty years. I passed skiing exams. I visited foreign countries from a very young age. And that stuck with me to adulthood – passion for sports, passion for travelling, and last but not least, a passion for books.”

“During the war I went to high school in Kladno. We remember the 10th June – when Lidice was burned down. The Lidice women and children were accommodated on the premises of our high school and we wouldn’t go to school during the week. We weren’t even allowed to walk by on the pavement. Not possible. And when we came back to school, our, the older children’s classroom walls, and the younger children’s too, read: “Mum, where are you? Where are they taking me? I am scared here.” You know, they carved that into the walls with something, last messages of the Lidice women and children. We had a hard time returning there…”