"They [neighbours who had collaborated with Germans, trans.] heard it on the radio that my father was there too, that he was defending the [Czech] Radio. And they said that we were not allowed in the shelter, that they had to throw us out of the house and the shelter because my father was working against the Germans. That we were like traitors. So my mother and I had to leave there. My mother phoned to the Bartolomějská Street [police headquarters] and asked what we should do, where to go, because we couldn't go to visit anybody. There were inspections, and anyone who didn't have it written on their ID card that they had a permanent residence there, that they lived there, was not allowed to stay in the house, in that place, not even with friends or relatives. That was forbidden. Anyone who would let someone stay like that, who had nothing to do there, would get in trouble. My mother had to go to call, the only phone box near us, there was nothing. And they told her to go home, to the room, to the flat - secretly, when the others were in the shelter, so that nobody would see. To be inconspicuous, so no one would see that we were in the flat, and when they would be able to, they would come for us."
"We were in the cellar, waiting to see what would happen. Then the Germans came in and we had to come out and they put women and children aside. They took the men somewhere separate, we thought they were going to shoot them. And they intended us to walk in front of the tanks. When they would approach those Americans, so that the Americans wouldn't shoot at them. So we would be walking in front of those tanks and actually protect them. That's what they said they intended to do. At first we had thought they were going to shoot us. There was panic, there were little kids, they were crying, their mothers were crying. I said, Mum, they're going to shoot us, and Mum said, well, maybe not, maybe they will, we have to hope not. We were really lucky that the Vlasov Army soldiers came there and the Germans ran away and left us alone."
"He founded a physical education union and they paid contributions to it. And the Germans investigated everything, when they learned about such an association where people were meeting, they investigated everything very thoroughly. And they found out something. And because it was also strange to me that the teacher Barták used to go to my relative, an old man. I thought, what could they possibly have in common? They were seeing people who lived far away and whom he hadn't known or interacted with much before. And then it turned out they were in the resistance. How they worked and what they did, I don't know."
Zdeňka Prokopiusová, born on 4 June 1933 in Kunratice near Prague, grew up in Prague-Krč. Her mother, also Zdeňka, took care of the household, her father Karel was a criminal inspector. On her first school day, 1 September 1939, the Second World War began with the German invasion of Poland. Because of the occupation of school buildings, which the German soldiers turned into barracks, Zdeňka had to change schools frequently. She would see the soldiers on her way to her grandmother’s house, and she was afraid of them because she had heard about the gratuitous killings of civilians. In 1942, her grandmother’s brother Ladislav Matěcha was executed for resistance activities, along with the teacher Barták. In May 1945, she and her mother were denied access to a shelter on the grounds that her father was defending Czech Radio against the Germans. She and her mother spent the last days of the war in a cellar in Prague-Podolí, where the Germans found them. They planned to send the women and children in front of their tanks so that the Americans would not shoot at them; they might have planned to execute the men. They were saved by the Vlasov Army [The Russian Liberation Army, trans.] soldiers, who drove the Germans out. In the 1950s, they were threatened with displacement to the borderlands because their father no longer wanted to work in the newly established National Security Corps. In 1952 she married Stanislav Kapička, but kept her maiden name. In the same year their daughter was born. In the 1960s, she worked at the Naše vojsko (Our Army) printing company and then at the headquarters of the Czechoslovak Automotive Plants. In 2022 she was living in Prague.
