Jaruška Žolčáková

“Then, my parents got involved in the resistance and we, the girls, would help them. Whenever they locked somebody up, we would go to our relatives and collect a few bread coupons, which we gave to the family of those who were in jail. So we gained some experience in this way. Then, by the time of the Prague uprising, my dad said: ‘Girls, you know what, come with us and help us’. ‘But what are we going to do there? We don’t know how to shoot’. But in the end we went and helped my parents. Even though we were just young girls, we weren’t frightened of anything. We were firm in our resolve to help. So my dad took us to the prison where he was the commander of that unit, as I’ve already told you. The wounded started pouring in from Pečkárna and from Pankrác. It was an awful sight. You can hardly describe it with words. You can’t imagine it.”

“This boy, he could have been fourteen or maybe fifteen years old at the most. He was dressed in a tank-crew member uniform and his legs were riddled with bullets. He was just sitting there and holding his machine gun like this. I and my sister, who was some four years older than me, came to that car where he was because he had no idea where they were taking him. So we came to him, looked at him and told him that he we were girls whereas he was a boy. But he wouldn’t understand anyway. We tried to talk to him in our broken Russian. We spoke German but hardly any Russian as our dad taught us German, not Russian, and it was a clever thing to do. Anyway, in our poor Russian, we tried to explain to him that he was safe, that we were nurses and that there was also a doctor there trying to help him. We told him that we would treat his wounds. But he kept repeating: ‘if you touch me, I’ll shoot you to pieces!’ So we experienced a lot of funny stories like that.”