"Olga didn't sign it, she said it was enough for one person to sign it (note: Olga Havlová signed Charter 77).That was probably Václav Havel's wish...we signed both petitions, Several Sentences and the one to release him, but that was towards the end. But not the Charter because I didn't even read it for a long time because they were out of touch and Olga understood that it really threatened the existence of those people. Which is known, because then they found themselves in the boiler rooms and had to wash the shop windows. So, in that way, I didn't sign. For those reasons, and because I thought I was going to be out of a job now, and I hadn't even read the Charter to begin with, I didn't get to know what was in there. And then when I did read it, I saw how stupid it was, how terrible it was that people suffered so much for it, because what was in there was all true."
It was terribly bloody and brutal, and I remember it well because I was already twelve years old. I recall families, like one family that had four sons—all of whom were shot by the Germans. Or there was one of our teachers, she had two sons, and her husband... I’m not sure if he was part of the resistance, but he was in a concentration camp. The camps were being liberated just before May 5th, so her husband returned about a week before the end of the war. One son worked in Brno, and the other, who was younger—only seventeen—lived there with her. The son from Brno came back to welcome his father, and it ended with the Germans capturing and then shooting the father who had just returned from the camp, along with both sons. These were such horrific tragedies. That teacher, who was also a customer of my father's—I remember him sewing mourning clothes for her because there was a mass funeral. Coffins were laid out in front of the church, and then there was a collective funeral service. She had mourning clothes made, but she didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to accept anything, not even refreshments. She said, ‘I can’t bear anything—everything feels so wrong to me.’ And a few days later, she took her own life."
Zdeňka Pospíchalová was born on 8 July 1933 in Třešt’. She grew up in a family of a tradesman, her father ran a tailoring business. Zdeňka recalls some events related to the war, the fate of the Jewish inhabitants of the town, but especially the days of May 1945. On May 7, 1945, a punitive expedition consisting of members of the Gestapo, SS, Schutzpolizei and Wehrmacht arrived in the town to free the Germans imprisoned by the insurgents. They captured several dozen men from Třešt’ and executed 34 of them in the courtyard of the district court. Their fate was decided by the daughter of the Třešt’ dispatcher, twenty-three-year-old Herta Kašparová, originally a Sudeten German and a Gestapo collaborator. After the war, Zdeňka graduated from a grammar school, but she could not continue her studies at university because of her ‘bourgeois’ background. From childhood she had broad cultural interests and aspired to study acting. She did not give up her dream and after graduation she went to Prague, where she started to attend private acting classes. There she met Olga Šplíchalová, later Havel’s first wife, who was the same age. Their mutual sympathy and common interests eventually turned into a lasting friendship. Zdeňka has many memories not only of the former First Lady, but also of Václav Havel. At the time of filming for Memory of Nations (2024) she lived in Prague.
