Mum was in a women´s cell. It was one big cell where the total number of fifty women lived. They slept on plank-beds. We made her to write down her memories after the war. There was no hatred or angriness in them, but she described there how they lived and how they helped each other. When a package came, they shared it and they organized intellectual evenings of Sundays. They would give lectures, read, and perform a theatre. Men brought them food there. They would always discuss if their husband would come.”
“All the males in the family were in the Masonic Národ Lodge. Grandfather Ladislav Syllaba was even one of its co-founders and its Worshipful Master. My uncle, dad and other friends were its members, my son is its member now. Masons declare the lodges dormant during the war and communism. It means that they are not active. However, there was a Gestapo officer called Kuzewether in the Gestapo and he thought that Masons had a resistance group and he went after them. Gestapo appeared in our house in September 1944 and they wanted us to show them the family house. They ended upstairs and I witnessed it. They ended in my parents´ bedroom, there was a wardrobe in the wall there and one of its parts had separated drawers. I will never forget how the Gestapo office put his hands under the clothes and took out some documents that belonged to my father´s Jewish friends. My dad later said that if he had remembered it, he would have destroyed them because they were not of any worth for anyone. The Gestapo officer became interested in it and he took my dad away with him. They gradually arrested all the Masons and also their wives who had not been active in Masonry.”
“When there was an air raid on Prague on 14 February 1945, I had a piano lesson in a street that was close to Emauzy [the Emmaus Monastery - trans.]. I do not remember how the street was called. I went from home before noon, my lesson was after lunch. The sirens were wailing as always before the raid. We were used to it so I said to myself that it was nothing. So I calmly went to the piano lesson. I reached the end of the Barrandov park with a beautiful view of Prague. Suddenly I could see clouds of dust and (could hear) noise of the falling bombs. I turned around and ran back home. The truth is that the house where my piano teacher lived was hit. The bomb flew through it but surprisingly the occupants were not hurt. So I was really glad that I did not arrive there.”
Hana Dvořáková was born on 12 February 1930 in Prague. She grew up in a newly-constructed family house in Barrandov. Her father Josef Filip was a clerk in the National Bank and during WWII he financially helped to the resistance movement, to pilots in England by means of Foreign Exchange Department. Her mum Ludmila née Syllabová came from a well-known medical family. She spent beautiful childhood in the great family house but in ended with the war. Her grandfather, dad and uncle were members of the Masonic Národ Lodge whose existence became a pretext for their arrest. Her dad, uncle and also mother ended up first in the Pankrác prison in 1944 and later in Terezín. All of them survived but nothing good awaited them in the new regime. The family had to move out from the family house in 1952 during the expropriation “Action B” to much worse conditions of a small house in Černošice. Hana Dvořáková attended a Scout unit since war years (at that time under the auspices of the Czech Tourist Club) and she has stayed faithful to scouting her whole life. She graduated from English grammar school after the war and she was admitted to the Faculty of Medicine without problems and she graduated from the faculty in 1955. She participated in restoration of Scout in 1968, she also joined the Club of Committed Non-Party Members (KAN). She successfully continued in her medical career and she became one of the leading specialists in gastroenterology.
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