"I remember when the May Revolution was happening, in the next street, Letohradský, there was a barricade at the top and one at the bottom, and my dad and my uncle and the Suchards' grandfather were on the barricade. And now we were sitting in that shelter and there was the caretaker Douba, who was all scared and spreading panic. I remember the women and my mother and other women shouting at him to leave it alone, and if he was scared, he should go to the barricades. About two days later, the door opened and my cousin's grandfather and my dad came in with a flint and said, "It's over, you can come out!" So we all went out and there was great joy. And about a day or two days later, where Milady Horáková street is today, formerly Belkrédy Avenue, from Letná Plain to St. Anthony's, there was an endless parade of Russian soldiers, but no tanks or cannons, it was all these dung carts pulled by low Mongolian horses, and on top of that was a pile of hay or straw, there was a machine gun...these maxims with this shield and these Russians had ragged uniforms, tired. Well, now we were standing on the sidewalk and everybody was waving, and Dad was holding our hands, and all of a sudden a jeep with a red star pulled up to the curb, but an American jeep, and there were Russian officers sitting in it, green jackets, blue pants with lanterns, and the Russian guy took us and put us on it, and the jeep had a kind of a clander next to the door, and he put us on it and drove us about 50 yards down that Belkredka...my dad was running down the sidewalk next to it. And then the Russian officer stopped and took out of his pocket two little coffins of chocolate, it was American chocolate, maybe he had stolen it somewhere when he met the Americans on the Elbe in Germany. And we came home and my grandmother confiscated the chocolate immediately because it was hard, saying that it would be for grating, for some kind of cake or porridge."
"I also remember the air raids, when the radio was always announcing, "Attention, Attention, enemy alliances approaching!" As a precaution, my dad made us - me and my brother, my sister wasn't born yet - these little hard cardboard clam pouches where we had a sign with our name on it, we had a snack in it, it was on a loom, we had it as a breadbox over our shoulder, and when the radio announced an air raid at night, and my parents woke us up and we took the clam shells and we had to run down from the third floor to the basement where there was a shelter and there were bunk beds made where we lay down and my parents covered us with some blankets and the whole house ran down there and my brother and I ran down the stairs and we twirled the clam shells over our heads like that and we called out the announcement in Czech in German: "Achtung! Achtung wiederhole, get your suitcase downstairs!"
"It's interesting that I remember a period of me being three years old, maybe it was because the time was so tense and it affected the child's perception. I remember the stay of the Germans in Prague. We used to go every day past the headquarters on Letná, past the Sokol Hall where the Germans stood guard to the garden that our parents had acquired in Troja on the island in a gardening colony. I remember the planes that attacked the moving locomotives, they were called boilermakers, which were American airmen who, when they flew at the train, would flap their wings and the engineer would stop the train and jump out of the engine and hide in a field or a meadow and the fighter would shoot the locomotive and fly away again. And by the end of the war, they were making it impossible for the German army to move and transport, for example, ammunition."
Václav Kulhánek was born on 12 February 1942 into the family of Oldřich, a bookbinder, and Božena Kulhánek, a seamstress, in Prague. He grew up there together with his older brother Oldřich and younger sister Božena, attended Sokol and Pionýr. He remembers the liberation of Prague and how shortly after the war, in 1947, his father set up a bookbinding workshop, which began to thrive, but had to close it after February 1948. After eleven years of school he decided to go to the Faculty of Civil Engineering with a focus on water management. While still at university, he was persuaded to join the Communist Party. He lived through the August 1968 occupation and a year later he ended his membership in the Communist Party. After graduation, Václav Kulhánek joined the Hydrometeorological Institute. In the 1980s, he worked at the directorate of the Development Management Department. For the last 11 years of his professional life, he served as Technical Director of the Vltava River Basin. His brother was Oldřich Kulhánek, a prominent Czech painter, graphic artist, illustrator and the author of our contemporary banknotes, who was imprisoned and tried in the early 1970s for his graphic work.
