"When the year 1968 came, this small guy... Pepik, husband's brother, who was four years younger... so they were visiting my mum near Nuremberg in Germany. And when the year 1968 came, they stayed there and never came back. Of course, we were having a lot of problems due to that - and especially my husband in the army. Even my son, who went to school, he was always in trouble. Especially when he went to serve obligatory military service, they found out that he had an uncle ... supposedly ... who sent him something. He never sent anything to him because we ceased any contact after he left. But they kept asking him, "How about the uncle?´"
"When I counted, it is down there... six, seven... upstairs eight, nine, ten... thirteen people. Five families, if counted correctly, as there was our great-grandmother too."
"What happened was that he [my brother] was working in the paper mills and received a summons to report to the military administration in Mladá Boleslav. So he took his motorbike and went and crossing barriers were there - a railway crossing - and he had to stop there. A Russian car from the exercise came after him, and allegedly the driver fell asleep and hit him. There was no help for him. He belongs to a group of people who are registered as victims of the invasion."
"When the forty-fifth year came, I knew that one SS man... He was a higher rank. There was a ravine near us when you went to the swimming pool, and there he shot his whole family - his children, his wife and himself. But we thout about it that it served him right."
"Daddy and I went into the woods to prepare, how should I say it, firewood. That was in the Sudetenland, we had to have a special permit, it was right under the Bezděz Castle, as those forests are. That's where it happened to us one time that there were two or three men at the same time - I don't remember exactly, but I know there were more than two - and they were some partisans. But whether they were Russian or Ukrainian, I don't know. But they didn't ask us for anything, just food."
“I was in the trade unions and worked as a treasurer there, so I know what went on there. Too many times I had a problem agreeing with something, as those people were absolutely naive. Let me point out, the ones, who were down. Later, they were amazed how it all turned out. I remember the kind of pamphlet the chairman made. He wrote, how we will support them, how we will ... god forbid like in a communist society ... we will share everything. And you what was the end of it all? We had a meeting, and to tell the truth, everyone was afraid to vote for it. So people preferred not to attend it at all. Because there was such euphoria ... look, there, he did that...”
"I can tell you something regarding the learning book. In the year 1945, after the revolution, my classmate and I we dag out a hole under the eaves... we put them there and earth on top of them, let them rot down there.
Under communism, we tried to live normally. We couldn’t be afraid all the time
Libuše Procházková
photo: archive of Libuše Procházková / Jakub Zvoníček
photo: archive of Libuše Procházková / Jakub Zvoníček
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Libuše Procházková was born on 11 January 1936 in Libavské Údolí near Cheb. She lived through the Second World War in Bělá pod Bezdězem. From 1944 until 1945 she could not go to school because the so-called national guests were accommodated there. Towards the end of the war she met partisans by chance. After the war, she graduated from the grammar school in Česká Lípa and while working completed an economics follow-up study at a secondary school in Liberec. She had one son with her husband Otta Procházka. Her brother Jiří Neuman died tragically in 1970 in an accident with a Soviet soldier. After 1989, she experienced the privatisation of Tesla, where she worked as an economist. In 2023 she was living in Prague.
