"When the shooting was really over and the Germans were defeated, the Czechs were so full of resentment that they finally started to attack the women and children. There was just a terrible slaughter. And there was - I don't remember this, but my mother told me - that there was a pile of dead, maybe sixty people, and completely on top, I can't imagine, completely on top, there was a little child lying on top. And very soon - I still have goose bumps at the age of eighty-five - very soon they erected a huge gallows in front of our windows, right in the square, on which they left a prominent German hanging for three days. So for three days, whenever we raised our heads, we saw a German swinging there. One horrible experience after another..."
"When the fighting started, we were all in the basement. The house has nineteen flats, so all the tenants from the eighteen remaining flats gathered in the basement and there we were waiting to see what would happen. It was all shooting around and everything, there were a lot of burnt houses... It was just a miracle that our house stayed standing. It's incomprehensible. They were all bombed out. And I have pictures of all the burned houses right around us. It's unbelievable. And so we were in the basement, and we heard the shooting, and soon someone ran... There were political prisoners in the Soudní Square, and they let them all out. And one of the prisoners managed to run into the cellar of our house. And after a while the Germans came and said: 'All men to the first floor! And to the wall, raise your hands!' And he had ready... I don't know what it was, just some rifle, I don't know what it was called, some rifle, and he was going to shoot everybody. And he even took my 13-year-old brother with him, who... and he said that even a kid like that could shoot. So he went through everybody's pockets, and he was about to shoot them all. Now we were waiting down in the basement with my mum, waiting to see when the shooting would start, when our daddy and brother would die. Well, out of the line of those who were to be shot, the prisoner who had managed to get through to us stepped out and spoke to the German - he was a boy of sixteen - and said that he guaranteed with his head that nobody os us had been shooting . Well, he learned that someone had just jumped into our flat on the ground floor and had been shooting from there. So on the basis of that, they wanted to shoot all the men from that house. Well, anyway, we were waiting every moment for them to come for our men again."
"When the bombing started, a huge bomb fell in front of our house and it made a terrible crater. And a fragment from that bomb flew into our first floor window. It shattered the window, broke through it. And the shrapnel flew further into the next room by breaking through the wooden door and into the second room. Then it bounced off a doorframe that was... that led to the second room, the hallway. And behind that doorframe my 13-year-old brother was standing, he was curious while we were hiding in the basement. Not in the basement, not this time, in the bathroom. Well, it bounced off that wooden frame in the hallway, hit the mirror, and fell to the floor, and the carpet started burning. So the fact that we were home put the fire out, otherwise it would have burned the whole flat down."
Blanka Lanštiaková, née Vacková, was born on 12 March 1939 in Prague. Her family lived on the Soudní Square (today‘s Hrdinů Square), where very fierce fighting took place during the Prague Uprising in May 1945. As a child she went through horrors that left lasting psychological effects on her in the form of claustrophobia. She experienced a total of four air raids: all three air raids on Pardubice, where she used to visit her grandparents, and then the devastating bombing of Prague on 14 February 1945, during which a bomb fragment flew into their flat and nearly killed her brother. But her most harrowing experiences came from the Prague Uprising, which she spent in the cellar of the house Na Zelené lišce. Later, as a member of Pioneer organization, she kept an annual guard of honour at the memorial to the dead, which she had had to cross on her way back home. She graduated from secondary technical chemical school and worked in laboratories all her life. At the time of recording in 2024, she was living 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!
