Ing. Jan Petrželka

"Then in January of '69 Jan Palach committed suicide by burning himself to death, so of course I recorded that the very day it happened, and maybe the next day after that we went with the school to ski training, and then we found out a few days later that Jan Palach had died. The teacher who was running the course had us go into this big canteen and there he announced the fact and then we stood up and observed a minute's silence in his memory."

"My grandfather was involved in this resistance. From Mělník he took messages to the representatives of this secret society and from them he collected information, which he then spread among the citizens of Mělník. This was quite important for the citizens to prepare themselves for the fall of Austria and to get used to the fact that an independent Czech state could be established. At that time it was not yet considered that it would be a state of Czechs and Slovaks, later Czechoslovakia. So my grandfather lived through the war by participating in the domestic resistance through the Maffie. One of his important activities was that he drove an aprovision to Professor Masaryk's wife, who was left destitute in Prague."