"It was on Sunday, Easter or Palm Sunday; I believe it was the Palm Sunday. We had a cooked lunch on Sunday at noon, just about to sit down and eat. Suddenly the sirens blared, they blared often, but we were never bombed there. Sometimes we went out and looked, and when it was clear, you could see the planes. At that time, probably not yet; definitely, there were no jet engines, they were ordinary engines, because they didn't make any fog. But they were visible, the whole squadron was always visible, so we looked at them. Well, that Sunday it rumbled more and started banging. So we immediately ran to the basement and locked ourselves in there. It was just like a cover, and there we stayed and survived the raid."
"Daddy didn't come back from work, and those who were working with him came very cautiously and fearfully to tell the mother that he had been arrested by the Gestapo. That was at the time when the Slovak National Uprising broke out, and as soon as someone said something about it, they were immediately blamed and immediately arrested without any trial. So they took dad away and he was imprisoned in Pankrác.'
"When I was in first and second grade, which was in 1936, I had the impression that Mr. Masaryk passed through Kbely. We came from school, we were about seven years old at the time, so we went out in front of the school, the school was right next to the road, and we got our flags in our hands and waved at the arriving cars, and Mr. President gestured to us."
Jarmila Ducháčková was born on April 1, 1927 in Nová Vinoř near Prague. She spent her childhood with her parents in Kbely, where she met Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in 1936. During the war, she graduated from the Secondary Vocational School for Women. In 1944, her father Josef Vodvářka was arrested by the Gestapo, he was imprisoned in Terezín’s Small Fortress. Jarmila and her mother had to live the rest of the war alone. On March 25, 1945, their home was hit by the bombing of Kbely Airport. Jarmila therefore spent the rest of the war at her aunt’s house in Stará Boleslav, where she was also liberated. She lived through the next forty years of communist rule without major problems. She raised two daughters with her husband.
