Helena Jasná

* 1931

  • “We stayed in our flat for the first two days, but then on Saturday the women in the house agreed in the cellar. In the dark, each of them went to their flat and took what they found, and then they made soup in the ground floor apartment left by Mrs Paličková – mostly potato or vegetable soup, out of whatever they could find and brought in. Then four of them went, with two carrying the big laundry pot and two to take turns with them, as it was so heavy, and also to keep an eye around them. And they carried the hot soup or coffee to the barricade near the Troja bridge.”

  • “They [Russian soldiers] had posts in two flats I think, with radios and a driver and a big off-road car. They had a map and needed to take things to a different post. I knew Prague so I went with the driver and the officer and would give them directions: straight on, right, left… and I took them where they needed to go. Sometimes you couldn’t go back because of barricades, roads without paving and so... so that’s how I would go with them.”

  • “We would go swimming, skating in the rink […] but things got worse towards the end of the war, with air raids and such. We didn’t even go to school towards the end of the war; there were no classes since there were constant air raid warnings... We would not even make it to the school and had to hide in others’ shelters; then we would go to school just twice a week and even that was difficult with the trips to school interrupted several times as we had to hide in shelters along the way. Parents wouldn’t let us go to school at all in April, and it all burst out in May.”

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    Praha 7 , Poupětova ul., 01.04.2015

    (audio)
    duration: 27:49
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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The peace was signed in Berlin on Tuesday but Nazis kept on massacring people in the streets

A period photo
A period photo

Helena Jasná was born on 10 August 1931. Her father was ready to defend the nation during the mobilisation but was sadly unable to fight for a free Czechoslovakia due to the Munich Agreement. They suffered from a lack of food during the war so they raised a goose in their loggia. The father fought in the Prague Uprising. The women in their house cooked soup in an underground apartment that belonged to one of them and bring it to the men on the barricades. On Saturday 6 May 1945 the Nazis started massacring Czech citizens, such as chasing people with tanks towards barricades. The witness saw broken tram power lines, barricades and overturned trams full of paving bricks. Many Nazis refused to surrender and kept on killing. One of the worst episodes was in St. Antony’s Church where Nazis took off their uniforms, climbed the tower and started shooting at people. Before Soviet soldiers made it to the church, they lay among the dead bodies and pretended being dead too.