“In 1968 early in the morning your grandpa from Olomouc called us and told us that we were being occupied by Russians. I looked out of the window and they were already passing by. You can imagine that my heart almost stopped beating. But I did go to work – just like the other people. But we didn’t stay in our workplace for long. The last message which we managed to broadcast was that the building was being taken over by the Russians at the moment, and the last message received from Reuters was that they had received this information. Then we could do nothing else but to retreat and get out of there. We spent some time in a rather secret place, where we tried to do our job in this emergency situation. (Wouldn’t you remember where it was?) Víťa, there are things that we tried to suppress in our memory… in case we would be subject to some interrogation.”
“When the Russians moved out of the building of the Czech Press Agency, a clean up team had to go there first and they worked for three days, because there was a horrible mess. When we returned, we found out that whatever food we had in our desks was gone. They even took a bite of a special rubber, which was used for cleaning dirty typewriter keys. A colleague of mine had a guitar in his office, and it was gone as well. There was a great surprise: in one room we found a little note which sad: ‘Izvini, Praga,’ which means ‘Forgive us, Prague.’”
“(Did some political purges or interrogations take place at the ministry after the communist coup d’état?) I was affected by it directly, right in the Petschek Palace. I was subject to four or five interrogations and then I was also interrogated in the secret police headquarters in Bartolomějská Street. I always carried spare underwear and chocolate with me all that time – it was naïve, because they would have taken it from me anyway. I anticipated that they could arrest me anytime. I didn’t speak about it at home, but it was obvious to me. Just when I was about to be summoned to Bartolomějská, it was on Saturday, and we always had potato soup and sweet buns on Saturdays. Just when we finished our lunch, the doorbell rang: they came for me. Just while we had been eating the lunch a moment ago, I had said that I hoped it would finally come to an end... The interrogations were very unpleasant. There was no physical violence involved, because the Soviet advisors were not there yet, but it was bad enough.”
“What I hated was when we were in the basement of the Petschek Palace, in the place where the Gestapo had tortured people – there were even still some bloodstains and Fučík’s bust – and we had to participate in some compulsory training sessions of communist songs or something like that. And on Saturday s and Sundays, which were days for visitors, they were showing these rooms to people... Can you imagine how hard it was to be in a room like that?”
Milena Pokorná was born November 3, 1921 in London. Her father František Pokorný worked in the press department of the Czechoslovak embassy, and when he got a prestigious position in the Mining and Metallurgy Company, the family moved to Czechoslovakia. Milena Pokorná worked in the Economic Department for Iron and Metals during the war. After the liberation she was hired by the Ministry of Foreign Trade, where she experienced the period of political trials after the communist coup d’état. In the 1960s she worked in the Institute for Interior and Fashion Design and then in the Czech Press Agency, but she had to leave this job during the political purges in the normalization era. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s she returned to the Institute for Interior and Fashion Design where she then continued working until her retirement.
