Hana Hejnová

"I have an interesting memory of the war. We used to go to Týn nad Vltavou to stay with my mother's sister Marie. She was a very nice person and her husband Václav Kubíček was like a river guard. We spent every summer with her. So her husband Václav Kubíček told some bad jokes in a pub somewhere. Emil Pisinger, a traitor and a snitch who owned an electrical factory there, heard them, and he told on my uncle... They took my uncle to Buchenwald, and he survived. That said, he (EP) also had people executed. Especially in 1942 during the Heydrichiad, for toasting the assassins at a municipal office somewhere. He caused them to be executed. Actually, there was a military facility in Týn nad Vltavou, and it was in charge of all the the executions in South Bohemia. That's an insane memory."

"My earliest memory is likely that of taking part in a demonstration in October 1939. This was the protest where they shot apprentice Sedláček dead and fatally shot Jan Opletal. My parents took us there, two girls aged seven and five. I recall, and this really haunted me long after the war, how the policemen on horseback pushed us out. Wearing those helmets, they fortunately wer Czechs, and they pushed us towards Náměstí Míru. Then I had recurring nightmares of them pushing us. We lived in Čáslavská Street at the time and our house was lined in red granite at the entrance. I had a dream where one of the policemen was pushing me there, and I suddenly lost the ability to move and speak completely in that very corridor. Then I woke up in a sweat of terror, and this dream would really come back to me for years."