Januše Schmidová

"Even when people listened to the radio, they listened to London and the Voice of America, but I always experienced that with my aunt. That was Velké Zámachy here near Mělník and Mladá Boleslav. That was the village of Syslov, there were five farms there and my aunt was still at the very end, so there they really listened to London and I just know I wasn't allowed to talk about it. That they always told me, Januška, you mustn't say anywhere that we were listening to London or America, because they would shoot us all. So I knew that was taboo. But I listened to a lot of things, so it was interesting, but I probably wouldn't tell you much about it today because it's so long past for me. But we lived through it, or we felt that we weren't completely free, that we didn't have our own country and that we had to obey. And also, I had actually learned during the war that I couldn't say everything that was said at home outside. We were already a generation trained for the next regime, because also you didn't always say what you thought because you knew there would be consequences."

"My parents were moving to Prague and my dad was looking for a place to live, and they were looking for an apartment, so they left me with my grandmother for a while. I was there until almost 1939, and when the situation started to get serious in the border area, my grandmother said at that time when the Germans were breaking the windows of the Czechs and beating them, she was worried about me, so she said she would bring me to Prague. But she was afraid to take the train, because in Obrnice after Bílina there was already a border, the Sudetenland belonged to the Reich. So she was kind of scared, so she walked with me. But imagine that I didn't find out until almost when neither my grandmother nor my mother was alive, that my cousin told me, my grandmother walked with you to Prague. And that was March, because we arrived on the 15th of March at two o'clock at night right there at the Podolský cemetery where my parents already lived."