"As an Austro-Hungarian soldier, he went to Italy, to the area around the river Po near Udine. The battles there were probably very brutal, soldier against soldier. What he wrote in the letters that I have kept is horrible. Before he went there, he couldn’t even hold the rifle properly, so they got a three-month-long training, where he learnt how to shoot. He got sick there, and it wasn't until years later that he found out that it wasn't pneumonia, it was the Spanish flu, which was widely spread in 1917 and 1918. There were many of his colleagues who died of that Spanish flu. But he survived, he was a well-built farm man. But he got terribly thin, and by the time they left for Italy, he was so thin, so emaciated. And it is really interesting, what he writes in those letters: 'We were marching during the night, and building trenches during the day.' It must have been mentally exhausting. And sadly for him, his arm was wounded in September 1917. It didn't tear his arm off, but the wound was really huge. And that’s how he got sick leave. All his colleagues - his classmates who had left Modřany with him, they all died at Udine. And his few fellow wounded soldiers and him describe the terrible journey back, how they were transported by the cargo train cars.”
"I had to be a part of it. And that time the [Aeroflot] was smashed because of the hockey game we won against the Russians. The Aeroflot was smashed, Wenceslas Square was going crazy, and they came with water cannons and smoked us out of that cinema with a smoke shell. The movie projection had to be interrupted, it was impossible to breathe there. We were lucky that one of the streams was directed to Národní třída and the other one to Wenceslas Square. They forced the people to go towards Wenceslas Square with water cannons, and in the direction of Národní třída people were only pushed. It was impossible to choose. We got to the National Theatre with the stream [of people], and there the people started to spread out. Then we were sitting on a bench by the National Theatre, but the people there were our people already, these were not Russians, these were ours. So it made us so angry, it was unforgivable."
"We had a big meeting - exactly on November 17. What was going on in Národní třída? There was a lot of fuss and chaos, people were going to Wenceslas Square immediately to see what was going on, because they knew something was about to happen at Wenceslas Square. But the exact time was not planned, nothing was planned. I used to go there every day and then on Monday I was attending some meeting in Jindřišská Street and suddenly I saw that Wenceslas Square was filling up, so of course - we stopped everything we were doing and we ran to Wenceslas Square. So from the first day, there was all the key tinkling. And it was just arising there, it was not organized beforehand. When Havel made an appearance for the first time, and Kubišová with her song Modlitba pro Martu (A Prayer for Marta) - I saw it all with my own eyes and not even a week later I took the boys there. I said: 'This is a historic moment, you have to see it! One of them was fifteen years old and the other was thirteen. But they knew their way around the crowd, everyone in the crowd was so nice to each other. When somebody had a problem, an aisle appeared, people made way for others. So I wasn't afraid to take them with me. From the first moment they came with me to all the demonstrations. Again I felt like I was doing at least some of my part... And since then, we've been going there every year on November 17. Even though we both walk with a limp now, we always have to go and light a candle."
Marta Neumajerová, née Vošahlíková, was born on May 6, 1946 in Modřany, Prague, which was an independent village at that time. Her father, František Vošahlík, fought on the Austro-Hungarian side in World War I, where he got infected with the Spanish flu and where he was also wounded. During the First Republic he successfully founded a road transport business and he also ran his own farm. In the pre-February days, her mother Marta was also a business owner. After the communists came to power, the family lost both of their businesses and the farm, and the contemporary witness’s brother František, being a child from a politically unreliable family, had to join the Technical Auxiliary Battalions. Marta Neumajerová graduated from a general education high school in 1963. While working in administration at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) in Prague, she graduated from a high school of social and legal studies, which took her three years, and later she also studied andragogy at the Faculty of Arts in Prague. In the 1970s and 1980s, she worked at Agroprojekt and later at the Institute of Construction Worker Education. During the Velvet Revolution, she participated in demonstrations on Wenceslas Square, and she lived in Prague at the time of the interview for Memory of Nations (2022).
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!
