Jarmila Králíčková

“Unfortunately, we had never talked about it much (with parents). I know that they used to take me to a shelter because I was born in 1944 and the liberation was in 1945. I know that it was a tough life, there wasn’t much to eat, I remember that. My mother used to go to the countryside to see our relatives who would help us and bring us food. I have vague memories of that, but nothing else much. It was a bad time, we didn’t grow up wealthy or in a good environment, on the contrary. We didn’t admit it to ourselves much.”

“I remember that we used to go to Yugoslavia with our ice-hockey friends to mingle with the “rukomet” (women handball players). We went on vacation there, the whole Slavia crew with their children. That’s where we learned about the Warsaw Pact Invasion and we simply couldn’t believe it. We had no connection, there were no phones, no Facebook and our local Yugoslav friends came to visit us and told us that the Soviet Army had come to Czechoslovakia. We didn’t want to believe it and thought they had been joking. They took us to a TV where we saw the footage and only then we really knew they hadn’t lied and that we had been occupied. We then had to stay there about a month longer because we couldn’t get back to Prague. Then we took a charter aircraft and even a train through Vienna, it was hard getting back to Czechia.”