Marie Albrechtová

"My mother took over this kind of left-wing thinking from my dad, of course, as her partner, she had a very strong relationship with him. She was never involved in it, not even in the resistance, because she had two small children just at that time, during the war. But after the war, when the trials started, which of course the adults knew about - it's nonsense that... they couldn't have not known. So she had this attitude about it: it's just not what Dad fought for. That's not social justice. We heard that from her all the time. That maybe Dad would be persecuted again because he was such a very altruistic person and a fair person who couldn't take it. He was able to come from a family that considered themselves - and was therefore very respectable and well off - so he was able to give up his possessions and his self-esteem that therefore they were something better. Because he just had such a sense of - I don't want to say justice, that's such a big word, but compassion for those who were really miserable in those days in the 1930s, and there were many."

"Even later, of course, I realized... it's not so bad if you don't know the father. There were existential problems, there was sadness, in that family. But of course who was experiencing it in a terribl way - was my mother and my grandmother, his mother, with whom he had a very close relationship and who then helped us a lot when my father was no longer there, when we lived with her for a while. So I just always realised that the greatest grief, the sadness, was with them, the adults, because the children just - we didn't know Dad, it was sad, but we didn't experience the shock when he was taken away and killed."

"I was born during the war and the beginning was not very happy because my father [Jaroslav Teklý, composer] was in the resistance during the Nazi period and was arrested by the Gestapo and was in Pankrác for a year and a half with very harsh interrogations and then he was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp where he died. When he was arrested my sister was about a year and a half old and my mother was expecting me, so I never knew my father and when he died I was a year and a half old. We grew up with my mother, who felt it badly and never got over it - that terrible experience. Then after the war, ironically, those families that lost someone, there was no financial security at first. And then, from 1948, she started to get a pension, but a very small one. There was still a law that if somebody received a pension and went to work while doing so, they would cut the pension in half. My mother, who was a chemist, solved this by going to the sugar factory where she ran the laboratory."

"I lived in Vinohrady, near the radio station, and I remember being awakened by strange noises. I never heard any shooting, it was like someone throwing something and it falling on the pavement - such sharp, short sounds. Well, so I ran out on the balcony and I could already see them passing by - we lived on the corner of Italian Street and there were armored cars going by. I quickly got dressed and ran outside - what was going on? Well, on the main one, where Vinohradská Street is, there were tanks from the top. I have to say that neither I nor the people around me were scared, there were a lot of people around the tanks - I met a friend there, and these people were shouting at them: 'What are you doing here, what do you want here?' The soldiers didn't understand, and on the other hand they were completely frightened, just young boys who didn't even know they were in Prague."

"It was a dictatorial time, there were all kinds of orders: you have to go to the May Day parade, go to some training and so on, but there were a lot of people in the Academy [of Sciences] who managed to suppress it. I, for example, had never been in a May Day parade or any such events, and I got away with it. Among the botanists there were people who were eminently interested in the botany, in the flowers. They didn't care about politics, if it was coming at them from the outside, they tried to keep it down - even our director, specifically, so that it wouldn't affect the employees, so that they could have peace to do their work and do something. Then, when it was decreed that there had to be a member of the Communist Party in the Botanical Institute, and nobody wanted to join, the head of the presidium said, 'Well, unfortunately, I won't find a Communist among the botanists here, but give us a Communist and we'll try to make a botanist out of him.'"