Zdeňka Velímská

"The year 1938 came, the occupation of the Sudetenland, and my mum had a choice. We could either stay there, but the Czech schools were closed, only the German schools were open. We were also offered to accept German citizenship. My mum decided not to stay there and move to Prague. Mum organized everything and we were leaving Vary among the last because she took a long time to decide and we were left with only a military car for the ride. The trains were no longer running. There was a deadline for people to decide, and we stayed among the last. We were taken by military car to Prague. My mother packed the most important things for us and in Prague they lodged us in Tyrš's House. "

"February 1948 came and they took everything away from us. They literally took it. We had to leave the shop and leave everything as it was there - with goods, with equipment, just everything. It was incomprehensible. His brother got the worst of it also by being called to the national committee. We had a car to carry goods from Prague, and we were such active young people. There were mostly older people in the newsagents, but we were also selling gifts and postcards, lottery tickets and everything. We were adding to the assortment and it was already quite a big business and we had excellent earnings. We were living well. They called my brother to come to the national committee by car. He thought they needed some information about the car, but he came back on foot. They just kept it and didn't give it back to him. In this way, they seized everything we had. We were amazed at how it was even possible. "

"I was offered a cooperation and membership in the party and [they said] that would provide me with even better customers and I would earn even more and so on. I tried to explain to them that it was out of the question. I wouldn´t have even been able to lodge more foreigners. I was alone, employed and renting, it meant that at first Pavel and I had to wash the bed linen in a day, dry it immediately and prepare it, because I didn't even have bed linen, nothing. The first thing we bought from that earnings was bed linen. I told them I didn't need more and that it was enough for me, that I didn't have time for it at all. They were persuading me that if I went somewhere with them, for dinner or so, that I would get to know all kind of things, and I told them that they couldn´t ask me that and it was out of the question. But it wouldn´t do for them and that I should think about it. They came to see me at Strojimport twice more. I always turned them down. "

" On the Gottwald Street there was a grammar school across the street, and it was close to a Russian church, so my mother got an apartment there and we lived there for a long time." - "Did you live in one of those villas?" In one of those villas. Tizian was the name of the villa. It was a nice apartment, but it was after the Germans, that's for sure. So we didn't move in much of our furniture. It was already furnished and it wasn´t pleasant. But it was meant to be. There was nothing that could be done. "

"My sister got married during the war and had a son in 1944. He [the husband] was a classmate and, of course, he had a group of students with whom he had studied, and they immediately went to the streets onto the barricades. They went to the Dejvice railway station, where it was very dangerous. Unfortunately, none of those young men came back. That was the worst thing that could have happened. When times calmed down a bit, my sister had to go and look at the dead, but her husband was not found. There were various speculations that they had been dragged off, that the Germans had stripped them off and taken their civilian clothes to save themselves. Some of the last traces were that they had been dragged to the barracks at the Powder Bridge. They searched for them all over Germany, on the radio, everywhere, and for two years no trace of them. It was only two years later that he was pronounced dead. "