"From the very first moment we had a lot to talk about, our parents were sitting next to us and we were absolutely uninterested in them. Neither my dad nor my mom, they couldn't have cared less. We started talking, talking, talking. Jeník was about to go to college, then when we were saying goodbye at the Těšnov station, where we were leaving for Všetaty, Jeník suddenly said to me: 'I have nothing to give you, Helenka.' "I was supposed to do oral interviews the next day, and I said I didn’t want anything. And then he leaned down and kissed me."
"To this day I am grateful to Associate Professor Hladký, because it was he and Gustav Bareš who stood up for me, Štorkán and Kalina, the entire faculty management, so that I could stay at the faculty and finish my studies. But I graduated and I was looking for a job and suddenly there was no job for me. I applied to the radio station, and things looked promising there, as far as the report card and the faculty recommendation were concerned, and suddenly a letter came asking my mother to come to Czechoslovak Radio in Prague. And my mother said, why me? She didn't want to drag me there, so my brother would go with her. They went to Prague to a man's house, and he was the first to throw my brother out. - 'I wrote, Mrs Zahradníková, that I wanted to talk to you, not to the brother, so let him go. So he left, and he said, 'Look, your daughter has all the qualifications, but because she spoke on television, the whole country saw her, so remember, there will never be any place for her in Prague. Don't be under any illusions, even in Brno or Ostrava, in any major mass media there will never be a place for your daughter, even if she has five red diplomas, because she spoke then.' "And someone dug up a report from Celetná Street—I don’t know who. I didn’t express myself very well there either, and that sealed it. There was no way I could stay in Prague."
"He was getting pretty, I can't say unhappy about it, but he was taking it very seriously. He said, 'Something has to be done,' but what can we students do? We can write a report 'One Day in Celetna Street' or I can go on a student strike, but that's about all I was capable of at the age of 21. I assumed that this was how Jeník felt about it, although I could see that he was also quite affected by it. He tried to behave as he had before, but I don't believe that I observed a radical change in him, as it was said afterwards that he was in a torch group, because he wasn't a person who joined a resistance organization or anything."
"In Albertov, where we lived, we heard shooting in the night, the Russians were shooting at the children's hospital Na Karlově. It wasn't that far from Albertov to Karlak, and we woke up at night terrified of what was happening. Then in the morning they told us that the Russians had fired on the children's hospital on Karlovy Vary, so it was a shock for us too, because we had always thought of the Russians as liberators. We learned that at school. Otherwise we didn't come into contact with the Russians, we were always told that the Russians had liberated us in '45. There was a certain ambivalence between what we were taught in school and what we suddenly started to experience firsthand in Prague in '68, and then there was Wenceslas Square, where we saw that they were shooting into the National Museum, that they were rolling everything there. We were told, 'We came to liberate you', we said, 'But from what?' Suddenly the world began to shatter, our childhood ideals of the Soviet Union, which had been drilled into us from a very young age. Suddenly we were learning what it was."
Helena Kavková was born on April 24, 1948 in Všetaty near Prague into the family of František Zahradník, PhMr. and Helena Zahradníková. In Všetaty, her parents were friends with the Palachs and their son Jan, who was the same age, became a childhood friend of the witness. When she was six years old, she moved with her parents and brother to Mohelnice. In 1966, she graduated from the secondary general education school in Zábřeh and was admitted to the Faculty of Education and Journalism at Charles University. During her studies in Prague, she became friends again with Jan Palach, who was also studying at the university. His act on 16 January 1969 came as a shock to her. After his death, she became involved in spreading his last wish that other young people would not follow him. Because of her appearance on Czechoslovak Television at the time, she was banned from publishing in the national media after graduating in 1973. In 1974-1976 she worked at the racing newspaper of the national enterprise Elite Varnsdorf. After its closure, she found work in Sokolov, where she wrote for the racing newspaper of the Sokolov brown coal district. In 1981 she married and had a daughter Veronika. In 1986 she was graduated from Charles University with a doctorate in philosophy. After her maternity leave, she worked as an editor of the Sokolov City Newsletter, which was later renamed the Sokolov Patriot, and at the same time worked with the district and regional press. All her life she was interested in history and therefore focused on the previously unknown history of the Jewish inhabitants of the local region. She became one of the active researchers and discovered a lot of knowledge concerning the Jewish past not only of the town of Sokolov, but also of the region. She has written a number of articles on this topic, including the work “Fragments of the Kristallnacht in the Sokolov region”, participated in the creation of the publication “Falknov - Sokolov 1908-2008” and collaborated on the publication of a specialized publication „Židovské památky Karlovarského kraje“. In November 2023, the book “Kamínky ze smutné mozaiky”, which she wrote with historian Vladimír Bružeňák, was published, in which the fates of the town’s Jewish inhabitants are concentrated. In April 2024, she received the award of Personality of the City of Sokolov 2023. In 2024, she lived in Sokolov.
