Miloslav Tlapák

“On May 8, early in the morning, my dad returned from Prague, Lucerna, where he was with Havel all the time. It was 7 or 8, I can’t remember exactly, and someone rang a bell since the doors were locked. Someone called at the main gate and my dad said he would go and open. So he went, my mum told him not to go, but he did. And there were four German soldiers, three or four. I remember the moment when my mum shouted at him, ‘Jenda, don’t go with them, the war has ended.’ This stayed in my memory and it was the last time I saw him.”

“As I said, I was in touch with Věra all the time. In 1965, when it was possible for the first time to travel west – well, perhaps it was in 1964 but I went in 1965 – I and my two friends from Škoda told ourselves that we would try, ask for the foreign currency assurance and would go to Switzerland and Italy. I told myself: great, we’ll go to Switzerland and I will call on Věra, my cousin. We made an effort to get the foreign currency assurance, we obtained it, but it took so much work, so much bureaucracy was involved. When the money was promised, you needed approvals to go. At Škoda, you needed about ten stamps, proving that you have not borrowed a hammer from the factory, for instance. You needed a stamp from your residential confidant, all kinds of things. What was worst was that you had to go the the military office and they had to give a stamp. But they would always say: ‘Well, but a military exercise is planned for you when you want to go.’ So you had to ask them to shift the exercise, which they usually did.”

“Nothing happened on May 8. My mum was scared, didn’t know where my father was, where they took him. She walked around Barrandov, asked people who were returning whether they knew something. She learned that in the Pod Habrovou street the Germans shot some people, and indeed, in that garage they shot four or six people. The bodies were no longer there but it was splashed with blood and it was ugly. She asked people who lived in that villa and they said that all shot bodies were taken to the church at Zlíchov. So we ran to Zlíchov and there my mum learned that my father was among those shot and his body was at Zlíchov. There were about thirty people who were shot in that part of Prague.”