"The youngsters were changing the directional signs. When it was for Prague, they turned it to Jirkov and so on. They spent the whole day and night on it. Suddenly, a Russian military car pulled up in front of our house. I ran out, the young men were sitting there, they were all confused and asked which way to Prague. I tried to explain to them that there was no counter-revolution here, they should go home. I thought, what can they do? The night the troops arrived, we were returning from a holiday in Yugoslavia with the children. At the border, when we were coming back, the young men were surprised that we were going home; the border guards themselves encouraged us to go back to the world."
"I had a colleague who was in the Communist Party, but her husband, who died, was also there. She asked me to sing at his funeral. I agreed. I chose something from Dvořák's Bible Songs. The comrade had his decorations displayed by the coffin. I don't remember exactly what I sang from those songs, but there was something about God, or rather the Lord. Immediately after I came home from the cemetery, the chairman of the national committee called me and scolded me for daring to sing about God. I replied that the wife of the deceased had no objection, even though she knew what I was going to sing."
Ludmila Rosendorfová, née Suchomelová, was born on 16 August 1933 and came from a family of a blacksmith and an agricultural helper. Her parents worked on the estate of Karel Žert in Bříství near Český Brod. Already at the municipal school the teachers recognized that the witness had a talent for singing. In 1945, the family decided to move to the Sudetenland, specifically to Březno near Chomutov, where they acquired a house left by the displaced Germans. Ludmila Rosendorfová graduated from a two-year economic school in Chomutov and devoted herself to amateur theatre. She attended a music school and sang with a band. She gradually worked at the economic school as a secretary, later at the national committee and at the Tube and Iron Rolling Mills in Chomutov. At the beginning of the fifties she married a doctor, Vladimir Rosendorf. They had two children: a daughter Michaela and a son Vladimír. The family was never interested in politics. Her lifelong interests included singing. After her husband’s death in 1994, she began travelling in Europe and visited Egypt. It became her hobby, and later in life she completed a lifelong learning programme on Egyptology at Charles University. In 2023 she lived in Chomutov. This story was recorded thanks to a grant from the City of Chomutov.
