“So it happened that my mother was still pregnant when the raid came. London was bombed, so my mom grabbed a bag. Back then, they didn’t have these baby bags that we have today. All moms – Englishwoman and foreigners – were running with their babies to Britain's deepest subway station Earl's Court. It has two floors so they could even descend to the lower floor that was used as an air raid shelter. It was used several times. When the siren was sounded the raid was over and they could get out again. These moms were all so stressed out because they never knew when the raid was coming.”
“We listened to the radio all night long. We learned that the tanks had arrived, they were on the way, there were rumors about dead-end streets. The Czechs would turn around the signs to confuse them and slow them down. Then I came home, I was completely angered by it, I was twenty-four years old by then. I heard about a case of a girl who died in Klárov. These were the children of those who had liberated us. It was a great tragedy. They were given a military task so they had come and carry out their orders. The only ones who refused, as I remember it, were the Romanians. When the girl was crossing the street at the spot where her memorial is located today, they saw an enemy. For them, it was a class enemy. So they used it as an excuse. They fired and that girl lost her life. She was twelve years old.”
“After the war, for about two years, I remember that my parents spoke English to us. But suddenly they stopped. People were terribly afraid at that time, it was crazy. I said: ‘Mom, I would like to speak English again’. She said: ‘Věrka, we’ll leave it for now’. I asked why? ‘You’ll understand one day’. Then, some years, maybe ten years later, they started to speak English to us again a little bit, but after some time it was again ‘Věra, we’ll leave it’. So I only learned English much later myself. Another mystery for me was that we would never speak about our past. It was forbidden for us to speak about it at all. Everybody will tell you the same story.”
“The women were negotiating hard for a plane to come and take them home. But they always said: ‘Next week you'll get it’. But the homesickness was getting worse and worse. So after some time, they managed to convince one of the commanders and he said to them: ‘Mums, we love you, but the only thing we can offer you and that is a little bit comfortable would be a bomber’. So we went home on a bomber plane. They flew those fathers who fought in the tanks and their wives home in a bomber airplane. Mom told me that the bomber was actually the very first bomber that flew to Prague after the war from the West. There were no seats inside the plane, nothing. The mothers were sitting on the metal ground in a circle throughout the whole flight.”
Mrs. PhDr. Věra Landová, CSc., was born in 1944 in London. Her parents, Olga and Eduard Weil, fled to England from Czechoslovakia before World War II for racial reasons. Her father joined the Czechoslovak exterritorial army as a tank driver and fought in France and Belgium, her mother worked in a London hospital as a nurse. After the war, in the summer of 1945, the family returned to Prague. Soon they changed their name from the original German “Weil” to Czech “Válek”. Both parents worked as lawyers, her father as a military judge. In 1952, her father was falsely accused of espionage that he was supposed to have performed during the war in England. He was subsequently demoted and dismissed from his job at the Ministry of the Interior. He never reconciled himself to it and in 1962, he committed suicide. Her mother worked as a judge but in 1957, she was removed from office, although she later returned to the legal profession. Věra graduated in psychology and devoted her entire professional life to working in the field. Mrs. Věra Landová lives in Prague.
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!
