“Towards the end of the war, it was around the May 5 uprising, they were bringing in wounded all day long, because the Germans still resisted. Somewhere, they would hole up and from the windows shot at healthy people. From 5 to 9 May, we were on duty at the hospital because they were taking the wounded to the hospital. The doctors did what they could, but we were in short supply of blood. It was being imported and there was not enough of it. I remember that Professor Sekla, who lived in the Lesser Town, learned that we were running low on bandages. He took a bike and brought everything he had at home to the hospital, disregarding all the danger. They were shooting everywhere. The doorbell rang. I went to open, and I wondered who it was. I feared it might be Germans. I had to unlock, because we didn’t have any guards. Everywhere in town there was shooting and Professor Sekla stood there with a briefcase full of medical supplies.”
“It was in 1942, a week before Lidice. Soldiers arrived here. They were in front of the buildings in the backyards. They pointed their rifles at us, they wanted to go inside. On June 4, at four o'clock in the morning. They were looking for Heydrich's killer. The men were driven out of the houses just the way they were, in their sleeping underwear. When someone said something, they beat him up, spilling blood. I would then wash off the blood of their faces in our backyard. Not all the soldiers spoke Czech, but each group had one soldier who did. There was an awful lot of soldiers. Some Germans were sitting on a hutch, some were at the door - you had to let them go inside the house and outside the house. Through the alley in front of our house they led away the men. My father had died the year before. We had to show them his death certificate. They were asking about him. They took all the men of Čabárna. They also took the fifteen-year old boy. I just went to put a coat on my grandfather so that he wasn’t cold. He was only in his underpants and shirt. When I was closing the door they threw a stone at me. At about half past six, I was allowed to go to work in the hospital. I would always meet with my husband halfway on the way in the woods. He lived in Švermov in Hnidousy, it's a short walk across the forest. He would always come to meet me halfway in the morning. I would take the train before he went to Poldi, so he could accompany me. He had nothing to do here, he was supposed to be home at seven o’clock. I didn’t want him to come to Čabárna for they would interrogate him, wanting to know if he had anything to do with the assassination of Heydrich. I told him that I didn’t know what had happened to the men, that when I left, they were still there, guarded by the soldiers. My husband said ‘they’ll not stop here, they’ll continue to Kladno. I have to warn my friends there to hide the books’. The books were anti-German. Immediately we went to the painter Souček, a friend of my husband. The books were buried in the garden, they were hiding it wherever they could. They didn’t have very many, because he wasn’t selling books anymore. The Germans owned the shops and they immediately asked what he needed such a book for. These were books about Czechoslovakia. They took the men away, left the women at home. The soldiers then never came back to Čabárna again. They didn’t take anything from us, even though we had a pot of lard in the next room under the bed. They were guarding us from a distance. They would ride on the bike on the road and watched to see if there was something going on.”
“The day before my name day, on February 14, 1945, there was a raid. That was shortly before the end of the war. The Americans bombed us by mistake. They were supposed to drop bombs over Dresden, but someone made a mistake and they flew over Prague. It was after lunch. The patients finished their meals and I wanted to take their temperature. I was in service. I went to the window that led to the park. I saw the airplanes, they hummed differently than usual. I said ‘the Americans are here, take your thermometers’. When I handed out the thermometers in the first room, suddenly a bomb fell on the staircase. We didn’t expect the Americans to bomb us. If it was the Germans, we would have ran away. The professor paid great attention to safety and thus everybody knew the signal ‘take cover’. They were all well trained to it, so that those who could fled to the shelter. But the bomb fell on the staircase, so everyone stayed in that room. I hid in the room between the cabinets. There was a lot of dust, you couldn’t see anything. It was complete darkness. The falling plaster produced a smog so we didn’t know where we were. We could only interact by shouting at each other, asking if the others were okay. So the patients who could not get out of bed and they stayed in their bed, they were okay, and the patients who fled to the shelter, died. Those who could came to the hospital to pick up their patients. Some of them took them away without losing a word about it to us. Then we went round the churches, where they collected the remains of the dead. For example, all that was left of our cleaning lady was her hand. I found her hand in the church where I had my wedding. They found only a hand with a reel with keys, by which I recognized her. She would always hold that reel. The park, where we were looking for patients, gave us a hard time. They should have told us they’re going home because we didn’t know if they were okay. We were glad that the professor was at the town hall at the time of the raid. At the time, it saved him. Usually he walked down the hallways sending everybody to the shelter. We collected the patients on the beds and they transferred them to the General Hospital where they placed them on the ground floor and in the basement.”
Jiřina Šnoblová was born on May 16, 1921, in a mining village near Kladno called Čabárna. On June 4, 1942, she witnessed a Gestapo raid, which sought to find the assassins of Reinhard Heydrich in Čabárna. Since her early childhood, she wanted to become a nurse and her wish came true. She worked in hospitals in Zlín and Kladno and was later transferred to the Divisional hospital at Karlovo náměstí Square in Prague. At the end of 1943, she crowned her long relationship with Jan Šnobl with a marriage. On February 14, 1945, while in service, she witnessed a raid on Prague, in the course of which the building of the Divisional Hospital was hit by a bomb. She also witnessed touching scenes while she was in service during the Prague uprising. After the war, she and her husband moved to Holešovice, where they lived in an apartment left vacant after its original German inhabitants had been displaced. Jan Šnobl completed his law studies and was subsequently employed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia. As a diplomat, he dealt with issues of global disarmament. Jiřina Šnoblová accompanied her husband on his diplomatic posts abroad. They spent a year and a half in the Soviet Union, three years in the United Kingdom, three years in the United States and six years in Africa. In 1978, they retired and returned to Čabárna. Jan Šnobl died in 1999, Jiřina Šnoblová died in 2018.
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!
