"At night [my brother] woke us up to turn on the radio, that we were occupied. So we listened until morning. I went to work, somehow we hadn't dealt with it yet, and I know that we were looking out of the first floor window of the museum, which is situated at the main road, as the Russians were driving towards Prague below those windows. And because of such excitement, of such disgust, I wrote a big sign on the museum, something like 'Iditje domoj!' I don't remember what it was exactly, and we put it up on the museum. We started collecting newspapers, but then they came [for it] from the district committee as normalization started. We collected it around the city, those handwritten posters, I had about four archive boxes, and then, as normalization started, I also got the White Book [Soviet propaganda book, trans.], but we had to hand everything in to the Communist Party District Committee."
"The new administrator Zbyněk Zbyslav Stránský came there, I think in the 1952, who turned out to be a well-known name in the museum spheres later, he was the chief museum theoretician at Masaryk University in Brno. But he started in Poděbrady, he had studied music theory or music history, and he made such a revolution in the museum that it became a political ideological issue. The museum was turned into an ideological tool. All the old collections, the ones that had been there, they were moved away, and instead [we] organized politically engaged exhibitions, space flights, human evolution, or growing corn the Soviet way, the Soviet Union - our model. So that's what he introduced there, and soon the museum rose to be one of the leading museums, at least in the Central Bohemia region, it even became the regional museum at that time. It worked for about two years, then he moved up to a higher post and the museum fell back from a regional to a municipal level."
"Then I realized that the Germans had needed a lot of people for the arms industry. As the war was progressing, they could use anyone as labor force. Because at the time people were banned from assembling and listening to foreign radio, and it happened that [my parents] went to Rybníček to the aunt´s family. There was a housekeeper with whom the aunt had argued in the laundry room, or they thought it was the reason, and she reported them to the police for assembling. That's why they came to get my dad. I was born on the ninth of April, and on the twenty-sixth they arrested my dad and a some of the people who used to go to my aunt's apartment. And then they came for my mother and her sister in Poděbrady, that was on the fourth of September. They took them here to the Gestapo office, then after the trial they were sent to Dresden, and finally they ended up being all together. That was both my aunt and my mother's sister, and also their aunt and her daughter-in-law-to-be. They tried to stay together all the time and spent most of their time in the prison in Waldheim, that's near Dresden. They were forced to work and worked in the arms industry."
Jana Hrabětová was born on 9 April 1943 in Prague. In August of that year, first her father Jan Plachý and then later her mother Jarmila were arrested by the Gestapo. Until the end of the war, her parents were being held in a prison in Waldheim, while little Jana was staying with her grandparents, the Kundrt family, in Poděbrady. After the war the whole family settled down there. Jana Hrabětová graduated from a general secondary school in 1961 and after working for a short time at Česká spořitelna [Czech Savings Bank, trans.], she started to work in the Polabské Museum in Poděbrady in 1963 as a documentalist. She gradually upgraded her qualifications. She studied ethnography at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, from which she graduated in 1983. In her professional life she participated in many important events and activities concerning the museum, including the creating of the open-air museum in Přerov nad Labem. Later, when a new director took over the museum in the 1980s, she was appointed to work in Přerov and became its head. She is the author of many articles and expert publications focused mainly on ethnography and personalities of the central Polabí region. Jana Hrabětová has lived in Poděbrady all her life and she became an honorary citizen in 2017. At the time of the filming in 2021, she was still working at the Polabské Ethnographic Museum.
