“There were raids. Sometimes planes just flew over the city, sometimes they threw down bombs. But sirens were the worst. I had a siren just opposite my window, on the house across the street. Because of that I gave birth in the eight month because that sound, that was something horrible. I gave birth in the Bulovka hospital. This was also very unpleasant. The siren went off and we had to go into the lift. Nurses grabbed the babes or put them on trolleys and went down into a bunker. When the siren stopped, they went up again. This was the end of the war and the raids were quite frequent.”
“My husband had a sister, who was born in Prague. And she worked in the resistance already. We had much fun with her. She had those leaflets. Once she was followed and she plugged the sewers in her flat with them. There were troubles, she had to call a plumber and he found those leaflets. Or she walked with a colleague of hers, distributed leaflets and bought pickled cucumbers. She had a glove. The papers with cucumbers soaked through and when she arrived home, her hands were blue, almost black. Her grandma slapped her because she thought she had been to the police and that her fingerprints were taken.”
“Theatres were always full as people were hungry for everything, even though things were much surveilled. The censorship was strict but people always looked for a hint, a look, a joke, how actors would look, what jokes they would throw in. A kind of sabotage. The audience was tense what would get into the play.“
Anna Pokorná-Ždárská was born on August 19, 1921, in Prague. During the Protectorate she worked in the photo studio Balzar in Prague, where famous people and Nazi officers had their photos taken. She acted in theatre as an amateur, wrote scripts and befriended a number of major artists. Her family was engaged in anti-Nazi resistance and some of her relatives ended up in concentration camps. After the war she finished her university studies, interrupted during the Protectorate. She made her living as a teacher of languages. She had a single daughter, which had to undergo a serious surgery in childhood due to her heart problems. Her husband had problems in his job because he expressed his disagreement with the Communist regime. He had to leave his position of a statistician and worked as a tram driver.
