Ludmila Hronová

"Certainly we registered the self-immolation. It corresponds with my worldly origin. It happened on the 4th of April, on Good Friday. On Jihlava's square there were various attractions, a shooting range and at it worked a good friend of ours. And Evžen Plocek, before he committed the act, put his final messages on the counter there. He wrote there: 'I am for socialism with a human face,' and: 'I hate insensitivity.' I interested myself in it, because I was telling people about it at a time, when I was giving guided tours around memorial plaques in Jihlava. I remember how our good friend from the shooting range told us about how this little man put down these notes at the shooting range and how directly after he lit himself on fire. So you could say that we have first-hand information about this. Of course, we obviously couldn't quite put it into context for ourselves."

"This work bored me horribly. It was something horrible, against my very nature. I told myself, that it couldn't possibly last very long. I don't want to fulfill my life by lending out some Lenins. Definitely not. And so me and dad did not know, what we should do, and so we planned a third child. Our third son was only for the purpose of me getting out of that section." (laughter)

"My dad still wasn't returning from work. Dear dad only returned late at night, apparently drunk, but like really a lot. He was working in Tesla then and they sat around all day and from some kind of helplessness drank away the occupation. And when he came home he said, that he's taking our car and that's he's gonna drive out against the Soviet tanks. We couldn't talk it out of him in any way. I will never forget about it... At home we had a painting of the Virgin Mother Mary with little Jesus, where Mother Mary has a small child, which she's covering, and she sheds a tear during it, as if she could sense that he's going to go through incredible suffering. Well and this painting hung there and mom would always run into the room, kneel before that painting, and would start pleading Mother Mary for dad to change his mind and not go anywhere. But nothing could be done. Mom had to get in the car with him and they drove against the Soviet tanks. It ended up being comical. They got out of Jihlava, dad went out, after a while returned, and they drove back home."

"I always turned on the radio in the morning. I turned it on and then the opening jingle of Stanice Praha sounded on repeat, again and again. And after a good while a newscaster spoke in a hoarse voice, saying that the armies of the Warsaw Pact have crossed the borders of the Republic of Czechoslovakia and that we should remain calm and balanced. I was of course completely losing my mind, I was just ten years old then. I ran to wake up my mother and brother, who were still sleeping. Mother had probably taken a day off then, because she was home with us. And now I'm telling them: 'Mommy, mommy, there's a war!' My mom was obviously completely shocked. We spent the whole day listening to the radio. Lots of different things were announced, how many were wounded in Prague and that there was a firefight in the National Museum and how many dead there were there."

"The Russians came into Jihlava at the end of the war and liberated the city. Or, well, 'liberated', we know how it was. The soldiers were ragged, wild and so there came a whole line of lootings and rapes. Grandfather used to sit in the house's driveway with a rifle in his hand and was protecting our family. He often remembered that, that he had to protect his family from the liberators."