Jana Marková

* 1930

  • "Unfortunately, I recognized that these people were the same. Nazi, non-Nazi. People were behaving ugly, ugly, ugly and maybe nothing had happened to them before. These were not people who came from a concentration camp. No, they didn't. These were people who... God knows where it came from. They threw those Germans into the river, there went the prisoners, those were such poor people, those were the grandfathers taken from the fields because there was no longer an army. He was dying there on the sidewalk; people almost also tried to kill me when I asked them to lend me a cup to give him a drink. He was begging for water so urgently... I'll never forget that for the rest of my life... A German mother had her toddler ripped from her arms and his head smashed against a candelabra. Really, people could do such shit... What those Nazis did, our people were capable of that too."

  • "The Czechoslovak People's Party, unlike the socialist parties, which build more or less on a Marxist world view, builds and is building on a Christian world view. The Christian doctrine of love of one's neighbour was revealed two thousand years ago, but how much older is the doctrine of force being superior to law, of violence being justified by success and natural barbarism, how much older is despotism, tyranny and autocracy. The dictators who invoke progress and revolution against us are leading mankind far away into the darkness of paganism, into the bloody ages of autocracy. Youth and progress are on the side of Christianity, not on the side of those who lean on the lowest instincts of humanity."

  • "They were calling the youth to go like into the streets and help the revolution, yeah? And I, like a right idiot, with a friend, a daughter from the professor's family, with Evika, we were the same age, and a young man also joined us, his name was Karlovsky, and his brother was a Czechoslovak officer, he was in charge of an illegal group during the whole war, and during the revolution he joined the radio, where they shot off his ear. He was arrested twice by his comrades, until he got angry and emigrated. Yeah, that's so out of line. So with his younger brother, he was about three years older than you and me. We were less than fifteen and he was maybe seventeen and a half. We went to help Prague. They were calling the university at the time, at the time... I don't know where we were supposed to meet, but we went towards Újezd, down the main street. We came to the place where Petrin Hill is, where the statues and the cable car are now. On the right-hand side there are low barracks, now it's some kind of Charles IV hotel. The low huts were already there then. And we were looking around and suddenly they started shooting from the Petrin Hill. There was a shop right in front of us, where a lady was pulling down this metal shutter, and suddenly there were holes in it. She pulled it up, dragged us in and shut it. So we heroically went to defend Prague."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 14.05.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 03:20:42
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha, 24.05.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 03:08:21
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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The Heydrichiad was terrible, it was anxiety, a creeping horror. I shall never forget the treatment of the Germans by the Czechs until the day I die.

Jana Marková - portrait photography
Jana Marková - portrait photography
photo: Archiv Pamětníka

Jana Marková, birth name Hlavsová, was born on 16 May 1930. During the first days of the Prague Uprising, she narrowly escaped death in a shooting at Újezd in Prague. She saw the cruel demeanor of the Czechs towards the Germans in the streets of Prague. In 1949, she voluntarily left high school for political reasons in response to her public criticism of the Communist Party and its involvement in the death of Jan Masaryk. In 1952, her father Karel Hlavsa was imprisoned for six years for allegedly supporting Israel. In the same year, as part of Action 77, she joined an industrial plant in Kbely. Throughout her life, she devoted herself to amateur theatre and held several jobs, from the cashier at the Meta company, an expert in economic statistics to a court judge for the People’s Party. She attended Palach’s funeral and, in early 1989, Palach Week. She gave birth to two sons, Karel and Tomáš, and has lived in an apartment in Prague’s Smichov district from the age of eight until the present day (2022).