Kamila Čepeláková

“There is a memorial plaque for Dr. Kalecký on one of the houses there. He was really a doctor who loved people. He didn’t have any luck in love, and he thus gave everything he had, his extraordinary skill which not all doctors have, he gave it all to these people. I remember that when I was sick with pneumonia, he was sitting by my bed till the morning. I remember that I saw him only hazily and he always patted me and touched me to check my temperature, and so on. These things are something which I cannot erase from my memory.”

“One day some people stole some lead from the factory for partisans, who used it for the Molotov coctails, homemade hand grenades. As a result, my dad who was in charge of supplies was held by the Gestapo for three days. There was one Gestapo man... My mom came from a large family, she had many cousins. Some Gestapo man probably noticed this and he knew that should must have had some jewels inherited from her family, and mom thus paid with her jewels to get my father out, and she didn’t even bat an eye, but dad never fully recovered from it, because while he was held by the Gestapo, he was being followed at all times, a Gestapo man was even going with him to the toilet when he needed to pee. But my father was only formally responsible for it because he was in the position of a supply manager. He didn’t know who got punished for the theft. Mom managed to buy him out of the Gestapo, and had she not done it, God knows where he would have ended, probably in a concentration camp.”

“In 1942, during the terror following Heydrich’s assassination, they murdered all the nation’s intelligentsia, Sokol members, communists… I begged my mom to have a sibling, I wanted a little brother of course, and it didn’t occur to me that it might be a little sister instead, and you can imagine all the stress on the nerves of a woman who is expecting. I was walking from school, and as they were posting the names of the executed on red posters, there were posted everywhere, and each poster announced the names of several people who were recently executed. Suddenly I saw the name of my great-uncle, a professor at Charles University. I was standing there leaning against the wall: Should I tell her? Will mom get mad? Eventually I decided not to tell her. She really didn’t know about the execution, she learned about it only later, but I managed to keep quiet and not tell her that her uncle’s name was among the executed in order to avoid causing some health problems.

“When the shooting calmed down a bit, he went to the horse which had been shot into the neck, and dad thus knew that the horse would die anyway. Dad had an axe and just like a primeval man he chopped off the horse’s hind leg, and he carried it to the others on his shoulder, with the skin and everything as it was. He brought it to them and they skinned it and cut the meat into pieces for all the people who were there, they got hold of some onion and paprika and they cooked a goulash stew.”