Jana Mazalová

When the Russians came, I was already going to kindergarten, we were in Prague. And early in the morning we heard such a buzz. Collector: "And you lived in Vinohrady?" In Vinohrady, on Flora, near Olšany. Well, I went to work in the morning. I told them to buy bread, potatoes, the basic stuff, while I was away. I walked to kindergarten because I wasn't far. I walked around the Ministry of Health and there were fully armed soldiers, Hungarian, Polish, Russian. And with weapons aimed. Those who passed by were immediately followed. It was a terrible feeling. I came to kindergarten. Where the children got, and otherwise everything was closed, they didn't get in. And the headmistress didn't get to kindergarten anymore, and then she called that everything would be possible to do, but that the cooks would do everything the same. And probably the children have to stay there to sleep over, that it would be difficult to get home. So I called home that I wouldn't come at all, that I'd be there all night so they could take care of themselves. But you know, my whole body tingled, now you heard gunfire all around. We had the advantage that we had the kindergarten in a residential area in Hradešínská. So there were no soldiers, but otherwise it was occupied everywhere. It was a terrible feeling. Down there, I don't know the name of the street, there was a youth radio station. Our team got together there and started reporting from there. But they spotted them there, drove them out, picked up the people. We checked all this to see if anyone was hiding there and gave instructions on how to behave. Collector: “Who gave them to you? Were they Czechs? ”Yes, they were Czechs. You know, it was a feeling of such awkwardness and timidity. You didn't know what was going to happen. How it continues. Now some children were crying that they couldn't go home, that they wanted their mother. Then the headmistress came, so she helped. She called all the parents to make sure the children were in good shape and that they would be fine so that they would not risk the journey and something bad happening to them. That's how we endured it. It wasn't until the next day that they slowly calmed down a bit, so their parents took them back home again.

And the husband was employed by the bank, and he wanted to be in the foreign department because he could speak French, German and Latin. But it was not of much good for him. And they figured out that he would be the leader to join the communist party. He said, “Look, I'll work the way I worked. But, please, I will not enter any party. I don't like politics. I like work, but I don't like politics. ”And because there was one who aimed at making a carrier, they were friends before, and he said,“ Well, if you don't want to join, then when wood is chopped, splinters also fly.” And because it was again a time when there were 75 thousand workers for manual work available, so straight from that chair he went to the construction site. And there was the hardest work on the construction site. Because there was no such mechanization yet, whole logs were carried on shoulders. Well, the one in front was somehow slipped, the one in the middle fell down and the whole load fell down on my husband. He remained lying, so the ambulance immediately took him away and they thought he would not survive. Imagine, his friend, a neurologist, who was in the hospital again, and he said, "Look, don't worry, we'll put it together somehow, but you won't be working for a long time to allow it all grow back together again." They have to take you back to work in the bank. It's not possible for you to be fired like this and crippled like that. You have small children. ”The youngest one was half a year old. So I stayed at home with kids. Then he was in the hospital for a month. Then he went to ask about the job. And that guy again who was already quite a someone, he said, "No, no, no, that's not possible." They didn't take him back. So he was jobless and out of money. Those who wanted to help him, the others, his friends, so whenever he got there, everything was good, so they said, "Don't be mad at us, you have a bad staff report, we can't take you." You know, he was without any work for half a year. I know what it was like to be out of work back then. Children were small and no work. Just because someone didn't like him.

The war was still terrible. When my husband and I went home, to visit my sister and my mother, at night, because we drove only after work at night, there were so called boilers flying over our heads. Those were the English pilots, and it was a terrible rumble, once my husband and I experienced it, and really we wouldn't want to do that again. It was a terrible rumble, the planes crashed into the same locomotive bombing it, so the train was left without a locomotive. At the time, we were lucky to stay near Kolín and there were depots with new locomotives. So they brought her to us soon. It was cold on the train, we arrived frozen and scared up. That was something terrible.