“When in the summer of 1989 our evangelical choir from Střešovice went to the Dutch city of Oss for the first time, they showed us a film about Václav Havel. We’d had no idea who it was! So, we found out about him in the summer in the Netherlands, and in November the revolution broke out and he became our president.”
“Not long after the war, the word got round that a memorial to commemorate some fallen Russian soldiers was being erected in Prosečnice. Later we found out from Prosečnice locals what had actually happened: These soldiers had found some barrels with industrial alcohol, drank it down, poisoned themselves, turned black and died. And so they buried them and erected a memorial in their honour.”
“After the liberation there was new trouble with the Soviet army. They didn’t hold back and some of them were downright savages. We didn’t have a fence around the Krhanice house, and one day the soldiers turned up and picked my mum’s vegetables from the vegetable patches. And then they asked my mum for some bread and had the cheek to say they’d got the onions at somebody else’s place, when we knew it was ours. Mum was frightened. When Dad got back, he went to their commander and said: ‘Your soldiers are frightening our people. They often come to see my wife when she’s all alone with the kids and they’re armed.’ The commander asked Dad to wait a minute. He walked off and brought back a rifle. He handed it to my father and said: ,When they turn up next time, shoot them.’”
“Jiří Hájek lived in a small villa in Krhanice as they had confiscated his flat in Prague following 1968. When I went shopping to the village shop, I literally had to step over a policeman who was sitting in a tire, all sprawled out, fast asleep. Hájek used to go jogging. He would run up the hill into the forest and in the direction of Těptín. The policemen had to jog after him and they barely coped. Hájek would run back to Krhanice, nice and easy, have a pint at the Prokoš pub, and the policemen would not arrive for another half an hour.”
“My dad’s acquaintance lived in a villa in Krhanice. When the uprising began on May 5, his son and daughter told us: ,If you get scared, come to ours.’ By May 8, we had already become quite frightened as we knew the Germans were going to flee through Krhanice. When the night fell, my parents, my brother and sister and I walked across the meadow into the village to the Houras’ house. They put us kids in their double bed. The adults were talking in the kitchen and I could hear the deafening stomping of military boots as the Germans were running along the path underneath our windows.”
The big shots from my district were treated at SANOPZ, the clinic for communist nomenclature, I mostly came into contact with their relatives – and servants
Jana Krčmářová, née Strnadová, was born on October 24, 1937, in Prague. She saw the end of World War II in Krhanice in Central Bohemia. After the communist coup, her father František Strnad was forced to close down his haberdashery. He hid the stock at the house in Krhanice and for years, improved the otherwise tight family budget by selling e.g. the unobtainable thread buttons. As a young doctor, Jana found it difficult to find a job and she was secretly unemployed for eighteen months. In 1966, she found the job of an internist at the policlinic on Chittussi street. In 1968, she became the district GP of Letná, Stará Bubeneč and Hradčanská stop area. In Krhanice, she witnessed the former minister and Charter 77 signatory Jiří Hájek being monitored and followed.
