"He knew that I was in the shower, and suddenly the doors are opening and I'm thinking: Jesus christ, why is he fooling around... And suddenly I see him... he was tiny, named Čížek and started throwing himself under the shower. He had a lot of diopters on his glasses. First thing that happened was that I gave him a mighty slap. His glasses fell, I stepped on them... Well, and then when the group was being disbanded and we were leaving, he gave me such a scolding: that I had always come here to beg for a job, or maybe I'd found something, like sewing little dresses for dolls and everything, but they'd thrown me out of there as well." - "Like that he wrote something into your cadre reviews?" - "Yes, they always hired me excitedly, but that ended after this." - "Why?" - "They said: 'Don't be mad, ma'am, but we can't accept you.'" - "But why did he do it?" - "Because I beat him up, because he followed me into that shower. He had no place being at the dance department. It was a man who thought that he could do anything he wanted."
"... They went one after the other, in a great procession, they went across the road from old Motol behind the barracks and there they first disposed of those Germans and then came to us. I saw them only as they were walking and walking and walking, in an endless line. I then gave them that sugar. As a child they sort of seemed like dads to me. They were tired, hungry, walking on foot, and had rifles. I was standing by the stream; it was small and thin, so they stepped over it and continued onwards, to liberate Prague. And there they got pummeled by the Russians."
"That policeman suddenly called, the one that knew granny well: "Granny, it's here!" And he went to hang the flag. That's how it started. Only we had the Germans there. It was under martial law. I was twelve years old at the time, so I don't know, how dad found out, that as soon as martial law was proclaimed they would shoot us all like they did to those in Lidice. Dad with the neighbor put all the wardrobes to one wall and behind them dad put the beds, himself in full emergency mode. He had a pistol. Then he said, that he was waiting, so if they came in the morning and wanted to do something with him he was ready to shoot us all and last of all himself. That he wouldn't give us to the Germans, because they were horribly cruel. There was an SS gang nearby, in those barracks. But in the morning Vlasov's Army came, and they liberated us. I couldn't bear it, when I as a girl found out that they had shot them all. It was terrible for me as a child."
"Jews weren't allowed inside trams. And those were the open trams, they didn't have any doors there. I know how my father turned that handle half to death and how freezing it was. It wasn't a joke back then, to ride the tram. And we rode to Košíř and that's a movie that's within me and is truly terrible. The Jew got on. This old, little Jew, a very old man then. And held the handle. Somewhere at a stop about seven boys from the Hitlerjugend got on, bastards. They started harassing him. First verbally, then they started to shove him, until they kicked him out... That was an experience for a whole lifetime, because nobody could help him... Nobody could help him, because they would've kicked you off the tram too and you still wouldn't have saved him." - "He died there?" - "Yes, the tram was going... it was from a speeding tram..."
"... the sokols substituted it for us. It wasn't under the umbrella of Sokol, but they still cared for us. Those boys, who were older than us - around ten, twelve years old - well they had to make the barriers and watered the playing field... in short the sokols taught children to work too. Basically they raised us. We had swings there and could take the stilts and anything else which was in the depository. And brother Shark taught us how to dance. All of that was during the war. I don't know how they did it that we had access to the clubhouse and organized dance parties there. I don't know, if that Motol was so cohesive, that they got away with everything, I really don't know that. But behind the threshing floor there stood a german barracks."
Eliška Podskláňová, formerly Hamouzová, was born on 2 May 1933 as the only child to the married couple Marie and František. Her father was an automechanic, chaffeur and electrician. Eliška spent her first two years living with her parents at her grandparents’ house in the poor quarter Holešovice. The family then moved to Motol, where Eliška attended school and Sokol during the war and experienced the liberation by Vlasov’s Army. In 1948 she, at the behest of her parents, studied arrangement in the Baťa company in Zlín and only after that could she fulfill her childhood dream of dancing professionally. She started in the Theater of S. K. Neumann and in 1952 was admitted to the Czechoslovak State Group of Song and Dance (Československý státní soubor písní a tanců). She married Ladislav Zázvůrka in 1955 and shortly thereafter gave birth to their daughter Eliška. During the late 50s she was admitted to the Artistic Group of the Ministry of the Interior (Umělecký soubor ministerstva vnitra), where she worked until its dissolution in 1966. Even back then she didn’t take sexual harassment and was punished in the form of unfavorable cadre materials that made her unable to find further work. Only after two years was she accepted as a librarian at the faculty of mathematics and physics thanks to her father’s intercession. During normalization she studied at AMU and taught small ballerinas in Kralupy nad Vltavou. Her first marriage fell apart after eight years; she remarried at the beginning of the 70s to Emil Podskláně, a chief of the SNB, but was widowed in 1980. Zdeněk Kytíř became her third life partner. Her daughter Eliška Zázvůrková graduated from a dance conservatory in 1980 and worked at the National Theater and Divadlo Na zábradlí. This daughter lives in the US since 1992, where she occupies a teaching position in a ballet school in Brighton.
