“I was a clerk’s daughter and since most of my classmates didn’t know what to do after graduation from grammar school, they applied to study at universities. I began to study the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague. My mother’s acquaintances had a factory producing cosmetics and cleaning chemicals, and they needed somebody who understood chemistry. I was a good student and I could choose whatever school I wished to study. The Germans then closed down the universities. After that, I thus decided that I would study acting. I went to see Mrs. Štěpničková, who sent me to another actress, and so on, until I got to Mrs. Suchánková. She used to be an actress in the National Theatre ensemble and she was a partner of Vojan. She tested my interest in theatre, whether I was fit for it or not, and I was admitted to the drama department of the music academy.”
“In Meisen, we stayed in a gymnasium on a hill. From there we went to Leipzig. From the prison we got to an international camp on the outskirts of Leipzig. There were people, mostly young people, of many nationalities. When the war was over, we were told to gather there and wait for trucks. The trucks arrived there the following day. We rode from Leipzig to the border, where the Russian army was. There were twenty-seven trucks crossing the Ore Mountains. The peace was not concluded yet, and so the trucks’ headlights were covered. The girls from Pilsen were angry that we had not been welcomed with music. Then, we continued to Prague, and a horse-drawn carriage from the butcher’s arrived to the Smíchov railway station to pick up me and one more man. They had been expecting us the day before (my mom was waiting for me), but they ran out of petrol and thus could not come for me the next day, and therefore they sent the butcher’s horse for us.”
“One evening a Czech policeman came for me and told me: ´Look, I have received the order to escort you to Prague tomorrow, but I don’t want to escort you through Brandýs.´ The reason was that in Brandýs everybody knew me as a former grammar school student. ´If you would be so kind and come with me to the bus, please.´ So I went there. It was stupid of me that I haven’t asked anyone what it would be like, nor talked to somebody who had been there, although I knew one such man, who could have told me what to do and what to avoid.”
“My schoolmates from the academy were arrested first – Vladimír Adámek, who suffered a physical injury during the interrogation, and then Oldřich Musil. What we did was that I would first give the food stamps to Musil, and he would be then handing them over to one girl. We were surviving on these food stamps in Prague, and we didn’t have many of them. We were earning money by acting in minor roles in the National Theatre or in the Provisional Theatre. After the war, Olda told me that he had mentioned my name during his interrogation, but that he was sure that for a few kilos of bread, for a few decagrams of salami or meat nothing could happen to me. But even this trifle was enough for them. From the Petschek Palace, I was taken to the Pankrác prison, and then I was to be sent to Dresden, but they actually carried me only to the Little Fortress in Terezín. I spent Christmas there, and at the end of January we went to Bohušovice and from there we left for Dresden, for the court building on Münchener Platz, to be precise. Dresden was not destroyed yet, but when we were leaving the city, it had been destroyed by bombing. Our prison got hit, too. The German women who were imprisoned there already knew what to do during an air raid, but we didn’t. We were crouching under the windows so that the bomb fragments wouldn’t hit us. The conditions in Dresden were not so bad, but in Meisen it was worse. We received plain coffee and a small slice of bread.”
“We rode to the Little Fortress by train. While there, we were allowed to give a letter to the warden, and I thus sent a letter to my mom. We were divided into cells; there were fifty-two of us. We slept under blankets on sacks filled with straw. Then, we went to Bohušovice and from there to Dresden. When we arrived there, Dresden was still intact. We were there until February 13-14th. You have never seen fireworks like this. They lowered us down from the fifth floor. The men’s block was hit by a phosphor bomb, and other bombs hit the tower, where the laundry room was. The smoke filled the windows of the men’s block. There was a toilet in every cell, and we ripped the toilet bowl from the floor and we banged it against the door. From Dresden we went to Meisen on foot. I had heeled-shoes and I bruised my feet in them.”
“At that time I shared a room in the Hlávka Palace with three other girls, and there were four other students staying next to us; we always had to pass through their room when we entered. I attended Jan Opletal’s funeral at Albertov. There were many students and policemen. I remember his old parents, or maybe they were his grandparents, walking behind the coffin. The policemen were shouting at us: ´Get out of here!´ It was dangerous, because our country was already occupied by the Germans. (Opletal was injured on October 28th, he died in hospital due to the sustained injuries, and his funeral was held on November 15th). We left and returned to Brandýs. It turned out that it was a good decision, because the police were arresting students in the student dorms that night. There was no demonstration, they simply arrested some of them and took them away. Some of them returned, like Čermák from Brandýs, for example. Later, Ms. Vavřínová (she studied geology, and she was to take her first of the final state exams shortly) told me that the older students had been discussing whether to attend the funeral or not, because the closing down of universities could be the consequence, but nothing could be done about it anymore.”
“When we passed through Dresden, we were passing through rubble. We crossed a bridge, the men went first and the women followed them. On the town square in Dresden there was a church, and the debris from the bombing reached up to half of its first floor. They later used the debris as a construction material. The German women did a lot of work there.”
Věra Tichánková was born in 1920 in Žarnovická Huť (Nová Baňa) in Slovakia. The family moved to Brandýs nad Labem and later to Liberec. Her sister Marie was born in 1928. Their father died when Věra was thirteen years old, and the daughters, mother, and their sick grandmother moved back to Brandýs na Labem, where Věra completed her grammar school studies. In 1938 she began studying at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague. Meanwhile, the closing down of Czech universities was ordered by Germans, and she therefore chose acting instead. She went to the Na Vinohradech Theatre to see actress Jiřina Štěpničková, who recommended her to Mrs. Suchánková who helped her prepare for the academy entrance examination. Věra was admitted to the drama department of the Music Academy in Trojanova Street in Prague. During the war she and her two schoolmates helped to collect food ration stamps for people who were living in the Protectorate illegally. All three of them were arrested in 1943. Věra Tichánková endured interrogation in the Petschek Palace, from whence she was sent to Pankrác, and then to the Little Fortress in Terezín and later to Dresden. She was subsequently transported to Meisen, and she experienced the end of the war in Leipzig. She returned to Brandýs nad Labem via Pilsen on May 28, 1945. After the war she was admitted to the ensemble of the Horácké divadlo in Jihlava, where she met her husband, actor Jan Skopeček. In 1948, she returned to Prague to the recently established Městské oblastní divadlo in Žižkov. With Strejček‘s ensemble, she then moved to the Městské oblastní divadlo in Libeň (present-day Pod Palmovkou Theatre). She acted in a number of theatre plays. Her daughter Marie was born in 1958. In 2002, she received the Thalia Award for her life-long perfection on stage. Věra Tichánková died in Januray 2014.
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!
