"At the beginning of the year, when the Germans came, they took out their textbooks and went page by page, and wherever there was any mention of Masaryk, Benes or democracy, it had to be blacked out. According to the ruler and ink, we had to have a special redisper for that, and blacken everything that was related to all this. So the textbooks then were more black and white than normal."
"We lived opposite Divoká Šárka, where there was a road called Kladenská, later Leninova, which led from the airport. At night we got calls from our neighbors that tanks were coming down that street from the airport, which were transported by airplanes and unloaded at the airport, and from the airport they went down that Leninka or that Kladenska street to the center. That's when a friend called us and said, 'The Russians are here, open your window,' we lived right on that road, 'so you can see!' So we actually saw the tanks going past us. But we didn't know what the consequences would be... In the morning I went to work, but I had to walk a long way because there were no trams, and I got as far as Klárov, where the shooting was happening. There they even shot, or she even died afterwards, a girl who, according to them, raised her hand inappropriately and they thought she was going to throw a grenade at them. But where would she get it? So they shot at her and shot her. And just before that, I arrived there, at that Klarov, I went through and reached the ministry."
Božena Bachmeierová , née Švejcarová, was born on 29 December 1927 in the village of Pchery in the Kladno region into a mining family. After the war she moved with her family to the displaced borderlands. Her father was a member of the administrative commission that organized the removal of Germans from Czechoslovakia. Božena Bachmeierová studied chemistry and in the 1960s joined the Ministry of Education, where she was in charge of the university agenda. She participated in the establishment of the Faculty of Science of the University of Košice. She also helped to promote the teaching of genetics in schools - on 16 February 1966, a government resolution was issued, on the basis of which genetics was included in the curriculum of science colleges. As part of the purges after the August 1968 occupation, she was expelled from the ministry and joined the clinical biochemistry laboratory as a chemist. In 2022 she was living in Prague. Bozena Bachmeierová died in 2022.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
