Marie Janštová

"That was so tragic, almost like the war in Ukraine now. We lived in such tension - even in the workplace, you could feel it there. People were always talking about it in small groups. Of course, the dental dapartment, it was mostly [against it]. If there was anybody [for] it, they were silent, maybe one person I would say, but otherwise we were all condemning it and we were against it, against these affairs. It had an effect on the whole nation, because the sympathizers [of the regime] were probably few."

"Then I remember that I was in the fourth grade when Heydrich was assassinated, and that was something terrible. The Germans were walking around with rifles and there was great tension. They sent us kids one to this, one to that, and they interrogated us. They asked us all sorts of questions. I know from myself that I couldn't even answer those questions. I just saw and experienced it with amazement. And I wondered what they were looking for. What they really wanted to find out among our little children. But before this was happening, the nurses were pleading with us, 'Don't say anything to anyone, don't answer anything to anyone.' They were just reminding us that this was a great danger. 'Don't say anything, not what you know, not what you don't know, just don't know anything, don't understand anything, and don't answer any stranger to anything.' That was such a commandment that even when we went to that civilian school, we never stopped to talk to any stranger, as far as I can tell, we never met any stranger on any street, and nobody ever talked to us either. People were very uptight and certainly experienced all sorts of things that we as kids had no idea about."