Dagmar Hazdrová

"Every day, a press supervisor came to the newsroom to check the content of the news and only the news that had a red stamp that he had seen and read it could be broadcast. Some of the wording had to be redone, and as a juicy detail, there were several buttons in the technology on the broadcast desks, and one of them was to turn off the sound. So if one of the announcers, for example, went ideologically off the air, the supervisor would just push the button and nothing would go out into the air, out into the ether."

"But what appalled me more than the cheering was the level of hatred of those patriots once it was safe. These fanatical radicals: 'Now we'll show them!' And all these girls who were dating German soldiers, they'd get them together in a crowd, cut their hair off, and walk in these disgraceful processions around the city so that people could spit on them. And I was terribly disgusted by that, how anybody could be a hero at that price. I found it absolutely disgusting."

“On 21 August 1968, at half past one in the night, I was woken up by our mutual friend, a doctor of philosophy who worked in education... and he said: ‘We’ve been occupied.’ So I chucked on a few things; the children were away for the summer. I woke up my husband and said: ‘I’m off to the studio.’ The Hradec one. And I was there non-stop until Saturday. I was at the microphone for 52 hours. Until they carried me out on my chair. I didn’t want to leave because I felt it as my duty, I didn’t feel tired at all.”

“Every normal psychologists and psychiatrists say that a person must logically fear for their life. We didn’t have time for that. I swear that we weren’t afraid. The fear came later, in January, when I was serving in Prague and Dubček fell. We received reports to the radio station in Vinohrady from all sides that an armoured train was coming at us, that it was already past Mochov, that it was equipped with cannons. That it looks like it will attack the radio building. Doctor Čestmír Suchý, who didn’t work in his position any more but was operating the foreign broadcast teleprinter, said: ‘We’ll switch off the teleprinter, we’ll switch off the telephones.’ We pulled down the security bars. We secured the bars with a chain and switched off the lights. But I was still afraid because I was thinking of my children.”

“There was one period when he was away from home for a long time. At the time the Germans came to search our house. I knew that at the beginning of the war they had taken down some ancient teaching aids – stuffed birds that had long been in storage so they wouldn’t be thrown out. They took them down and put secret notes, instructions into their beaks or various crevices. I knew they were there even though my parents didn’t. The Germans tried to lure me somehow into telling them where Dad was. I didn’t know where. I told them he was visiting my auntie, his sister. They gave me chocolate. What visitors did we have? You wouldn’t believe how a nine-year-old child can suddenly grow up. I knew I mustn’t tell anything at all.”