Zdeněk Cvrk

* 1933

  • "We were herded back into the basement, it was dangerous, we had to close the windows and we had to be in the basement. The cellar was still empty, like the air-raid shelter, it worked. Well, and now there was a moment when the SS men, I don't know whether from the train or from somewhere, with machine guns, came in again and drove out all the men who were between 25 and 35 years old. So they drove them out, nobody knew what was going to happen to them, their parents thought they were just going to be executed or something. And they drove them in front of the tanks like a shield and they had to break down the barricades. Because they knew that the people from the barricades... Because here came the tanks and there was somebody with a flintlock or a pistol here and there and this, they didn't stand a chance against the tanks. At that time there was a bridge on Balabenka, which just prevented those tanks, it was in the slope, because the track went on such a viaduct. The tanks didn't have a chance like to go around it or on that slope and that. So these people, we didn't find out until, fortunately, they all came back, right, so they just drove them around Rokytka then along Sokolovska in front of the tanks, because they knew that they wouldn't fire from that barricade against those our people that they used as a human shield, right. Moreover, there was no chance to do anything with a gun or a pistol against those tanks. But simply those people left the barricade and our people who were chased by those SS men like that had to dismantle the barricade."

  • "First the American fighter jets started flying there. We always - because there was no central heating in those days, right, it was heated at home in the stove, so there was a footbridge with a railing on the top of the roof by the chimneys - so when the siren went off, until then there were no bombers over Prague, only the American fighters, so we always went up on the roof and watched from the roof as the depth pilots flew into the Kbely airport. What was outside, what wasn't in the hangars, they just shot it up. And then the Germans just bulldozed it, and there was this slope next to the airfield, and there was a bunch of shot-up messerchmitts and fighters like that. It was called a burial ground. That was towards Hloubetin, under the Kbely airport."

  • "Then there were sirens, weren't there, and it occurs to me that one time... We were poor, we didn't have, like, a radio. Now the siren was going off and there were always a few people in the house who had radios then. So then one of them came running to us, saying that martial law had been declared, in 1942. And so we were... Because the cellars were made into air-raid shelters, yeah, and the cellars were evicted. There was a garden attached to the house, where they formed the cellars out of these canvas wooden poles, and the cellars were moved out, and the air-raid shelters were made out of that. And so he chased us down into the cellar, saying that martial law had been declared. So we were in the cellar, and suddenly two SS men burst in with machine guns, one was standing at the door pointing a machine gun at us, and the other one went to the men who were between 25 and 35 years old. He always took them by the chin. Like this. Now he just turned his head forcibly, and the SS man who was standing at the door with his machine gun pointed at us always shook his head no. And there was one lady, Vávrová, who was a widow too, and she had a son the same age as me. She was the only one who spoke German, so she told the SS men that there were only people living in that house who hadn't come from anywhere. We didn't know then that it was an assassination attempt on Heydrich."

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In order to study, I had to get along with the working class

Zdeněk Cvrk
Zdeněk Cvrk
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Zdeněk Cvrk was born on 28 November 1933 in Prague to Růžena and Václav Cvrk. When he was six years old, his father died and he was was experiencing a shortage during the war. On March 25, 1945, he experienced the bombing in Prague‘s Vysočany district - from the roof of his house he watched the planes attack the Kbely airport. He lived through the Prague Uprising hidden in the cellar, from where German soldiers pulled out young men to serve as human shields during the retreat. After the war he joined Junák and Sokol and in June 1948 he took part in the XIth All-Sokol Meeting. After finishing primary school he was not allowed to start further studies. In 1958, he married and raised two children with his wife. All his life he worked in the ecological department at the Research Institute of Chemical Equipment in Malešice. Despite insistence, he never joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). In 2024 he lived in Prague.