"In the year sixty-eight, I was working at Interproject in Prague 1 at the City Hall, and there was a cannon or something in front of the Prague City Hall, and they kept waving it into Žatecká Street, where we had a business. And I also witnessed that it was raining on Klárova Street, and a girl, a student, jumped out of the tram, and she had an umbrella folded up, and they thought it was a machine gun, so they shot her. That was the occupation in '68, it was terrible. We couldn't recover from that. At that time the boss told us we had to stay home until the situation calmed down."
- "And how did you experience this event?"
"Well, pretty horrible, nobody knew what was going to happen. People were out in the streets, even my husband had some paint, and as the tanks of those Russians were coming, he was putting paint on their visors. When he told me this afterwards, I got chills, because they could have killed him. And also there was no goods at all, they were literally stealing, bread, butter, milk from the shops, because there was nothing to eat. Even the Russians had nothing to eat."
"That's what I wanted to remember too, back when the war was over, just after the war, and the Russians drove tanks through Slabce, so of course, they were soldiers, they were very hungry. That takes me back to the year forty-five. What was moving they killed and ate, there's no other way to put it. There was a kind of militia and they herded all the women and children into the woods and we lived for two days, two nights in bunkers. We hid there because we were afraid."
"I was in the fourth grade and it was already obvious that the war would be over, the year forty-five was approaching. We had a wonderful teacher, Sam Petranek, and he was telling us the history of the Czech nation, and when the door opened, the headmaster came in with two guys in leather coats, and it was the Gestapo. They arrested the dear teacher and we were as quiet as foam because we were so afraid of what was going to happen. The headmaster stopped classes and we had to go home. After the war, it was the year forty-five, May, it was wonderful, people were rejoicing, dancing, singing, and I met that teacher. He was healthy and alive, a survivor of Auschwitz, so we were happy to meet him."
Věra Pittermannová, née Holubová, was born on 7 April 1935 in Prague. She attended primary school during World War II, first in Prague and later in the village of Slabce, where her family moved to stay with relatives. Her father owned two shops in Prague and her maternal grandparents ran a private farm. They lost their shops and a farm after February 1948. She wanted to become a teacher, but after the February coup she was unable to study at a grammar school because her father was a tradesman and her grandparents were private farmers. She studied at a post school and a two-year business academy in Karlín. After her husband emigrated to the West following their divorce, she was pressured by State Security (StB) and underwent two interrogations. State Security suspected that she wanted to emigrate to her ex-husband.
