Jarmila Dvořáková

“An StB agent came and said that these people needed to be lodged in these rooms because these were wiretapped. But because they were our friends, we took them aside and told them that these rooms were bugged. We told them to be careful when speaking in these rooms.”

“The café had large windows on the Wenceslas Square, so we would watch all historical events through these windows from the café. I know that I was sitting on the coffee table and was watching what was going on outside. I remember that in September the funeral of Edvard Beneš took place. I did not understand much of it at that time and everybody was crying, down in the street and around me, everybody was crying. I was terribly ashamed not to be crying. So I like spit on my finger and would touch my eyelids with it, so that my eyes too were wet...”

“When my mom was still in prison, here in this photo is my aunt Růža, this is my brother, this is Emílek, and my mother’s brother’s wife, Mrs. Mikešová. All of these women agreed that in protest against the war they’d give birth to a child. And that better times are about to come.”

“When the Germans conquered Paris and got inside the broadcast, they found a letter from my mom. Thus she was invited in October 1942 to the Petschek palace. My mom only managed to scribble on the table for my dad the following message: ‘They’re taking me to Pečkárna, I'll be back in the afternoon’. But she wasn’t. They arrested her and took her to Waldheim in Berlin. She was by then already shortly pregnant. I should have been born in May 1943, but probably due to the situation and the circumstances in which my mom had to live in prison, I was born already in April.”