Milada Pešková

“She was telling me (Mrs. Hana Benešová – ed.’s note) various stories from England. She told me about the time when they lived directly in London; the Czechoslovaks had one house there just for themselves. Moravec, our general who was in England during the war, was there at that time. She told me that one day she used a lift when London was experiencing frequent air raids. The lift stopped between two floors and there was no mechanic available who would be able to get them down. They allegedly spent about an hour inside that lift. She said that it was terrible, because the lift was going to the uppermost floor and she could really hear the bombs as they were being dropped from the airplanes that were flying overhead. They expected that a bomb would drop right on their house. I remember that she was also telling me about these memories from the war. She was quite active there; she immediately joined the local Red Cross. She was a truly nice and pleasant lady who did not pretend to be somebody. She was always elegant, but elegant in the English way, so to speak. No frills or decorations on their dresses. She always wore a good-class fashion.”

“We were listening to the radio and as I was standing by the window, the Rudé Právo newspaper building, the printing works, was across the street diagonally from us. Suddenly I thought that something was going to happen there. When the Russians arrived here, at first they took over all the ministry buildings, the Petschek Palace and all these administrative buildings. They occupied the building of the Rudé Právo newspaper as well. Soldiers took over the building and each of them had a rifle in the window. I was looking out of the window and I said, this is strange, I can see a rifle sticking out of a window, I hope the Russians did not occupy the building, did they? And it was indeed so. They were on guard in the windows in case something happened. All of a sudden we could hear horrible bangs, shooting, and then there was a blast as if from a cannon. This was followed by an insane crashing of our window glass. Since we had double-paned windows, the blast was awful when the glass shattered as they were shooting. We did not know what was happening. We thought that they were shooting at us, at the Labuť department store. But they made a mistake: when the Germans stood in front of our borders and they had their military exercise, a part of the soldiers who played the role of the enemy had white stripes painted on their tanks. American army tanks had the same type of marking. As the Russians were advancing toward us from the train station and taking over the vehicles, they were not riding in the original Russian vehicles, but they had the white marks on them. When they entered further into the Na Poříčí Street and they saw that tanks with white stripes were there, they thought that they might be probably Americans and they started shooting at them.”

“When I was on Hlávka Bridge, as I was walking all of a sudden I saw a guy in a uniform. I thought, what the heck, what a weird uniform it is? He was a Russian and I didn’t recognize him. I crossed the bridge and when I was almost at the end of the bridge, as I was looking at the embankment - the ministry of railways used to be there – I was wondering what was happening there. Some tanks were standing in front of the ministry building. I could see that there were soldiers on those tanks and that they had a kind of red berets. And as an idiot, I even thought that they might be English, because Englishmen had this kind of berets. When the war had ended and people celebrated, they were riding around in these berets. And so I thought that the soldiers were Englishmen. Some gentleman was passing by and I exclaimed: Christ, did the English arrive here? I was looking at the berets and the man says, well, they are not English, it’s the Russians who came to occupy us!”