Květa Pěničková

“Franz Pösl lived alone in the forest, in a seclusion not far from Zlatá Studna. He had a lot going for him and he realised he was in danger. That if they caught someone and beat them up, he would be betrayed. And that happened and they came to get him. Because they knew he was an old smuggler, in good physical condition and brave, and that he would be able to escape them, they came up with a trap. They came to him saying they had been bogged down in the forest, if he wouldn’t lend them a plank. He brought them one and they said: ‘We’re arresting you.’ ”

“We knew that a big armed force would still arrive in Chuchle. Someone came up with the idea that there was an abandoned quarry and mineshaft above Chuchle, and he gave the order that all inhabitants should go there and hide. I have a bad memory of that. At the time my father was somewhere on the barricades, and Mum was at home getting something to drink for the Vlasovites that had come to us. So I was there alone, with the other children, anxiously awaiting my parents. The quarry was about a kilometre and a half away from our house, in the direction of Slivenec. It was organised by some officers of the Czechoslovak army. It was six in the evening and my parents were nowhere to be seen. And the officers kept repeating that they would have to have the entrance to the shaft blown shut so that the Germans couldn’t get in when they arrived. It was getting dark. Finally Mum arrived. She brought with her a wooden cart with some of our belongings. A duvet, a pillow, and one suitcase with some food. I was already raving, continually going up to the officers and begging them: ‘Please, don’t blow it closed yet! I still don’t have my Daddy here!’ So they hesitated and in the end Dad did arrive. They had to retreat as the odds were overwhelmingly against them. And then someone here realised that it wasn’t possible to blow up the entrance and close us in, because the mineshaft wasn’t explored, it wasn’t clear if the people might maybe suffocate inside etcetera. So they left it open. At half past twelve in the night we heard gunfire from down below. And someone told my father that he was on the list of those who would be executed. That it was in the works. The Germans had been invited to Chuchle by one Mrs Baráčková. She was a Czech German, a fanatical Nazi. She communicated with the Germans through some kind of transmitter device, and she informed them of everything. So the army came, dragged the people out of the mineshaft, and instituted martial law. And the people who were known to have fought on the barricades in Prague or here at the racing track, they were to be executed. But Dad found out about it in time. So we didn’t wait for a moment, we took the cart and legged it away from Chuchle. To Slivenec, Ořech, and onwards.”

“My father went grey during the war. And I learnt how to pray very intensely. Because one time Dad went by himself to Petschek’s Palace. It happened thus: In our house there lived a certain Mr Mašek, who tried all sorts of tricks and slander against my father to obtain our flat. Dad would go to work with one Mr Bláha, also from Velká Chuchle, who endorsed the Nazis during the war and was then a clerk at the Petschekery. When they were standing on Wenceslas Square one time, watching Hitler’s arrival, my father declared: ‘If I had a machine gun, I would take the beast down right here, no matter what happened.’ But Mr Bláha asked him never to say anything like that in front of him again. He didn’t take it any further, luckily. So Dad went to visit him one time at the Petchekery. And he, like every Nazi, was grooming ‘his Jew’, his back door in case Germany lost. And so instead of complying with the arrest that Mašek was suggesting, he sent my father home and sent [Mr Mašek] away from Prague for a year for excessive blackmailing of half-Jewish families.”

“After the war the German army was taken from Prague and put into the Zbraslav Camp. People with bandaged heads, some even crawling on all fours. In Chuchle we had one ‘good citizen’ who collaborated with the Germans during the war. He lived in a secluded cottage in the forest, and one time a transport passed him by headed to the concentration camp. Two of the poor blighters were somehow able to escape, and they climbed up into his loft. Not only did he not help them, but he even told on them. And then he wanted to show his zeal and to clean himself. So he found himself a large piece of wood, and he went to the road and started bashing the soldiers on their battered heads. My father called on a few friends and they went to protect the soldiers.”