Vlasta Šedivá

“I completed town school in 1936, business school in 1937. I was in the border regions twice for almost two months, to learn German. It wasn’t an exchange, I know that it cost about three hundred crowns back then. On someone’s recommendation I stayed twice at a family in Desné (it went by the German name of Dessendorf at the time) near Tanvald. As far as I know, in the whole village there just one Communist family and one Social Democratic one. All the others were raving Henleinites. The first time I was taken up by the family of Mr Leitark, he was relatively apolitical. His younger daughter was about my age, a very decent girl. But unfortunately a year later she left to join her elder brother in Germany, so there was no reason for me to return to their family. The second family I came in to owned a grocery. I can’t say they were bad to me, but they didn’t have any time for me at all. Their daughter was the same age as me and a raving Henleinite. In those days the Henleinites were already marching threw the village in their white knee-length socks at dusk. They didn’t hurt me. I went with them, I felt isolated and I had my own opinion on things - war was already raging in Spain at the time, and those of us from the experimental school knew which side was in the right.”

“I acted as a messenger between Prague and Brno, in 1944 I became a regular member of Předvoj [Vanguard]. Předvoj was made up of the extreme left-wing youth, it also included the Evangelical youth from Smíchov. The members were from seventeen to twenty-three years old. They published the magazine Předvoj, they supplied me with foils, I wrote texts into the foils and gave them back again. It was all the more risqué because I lived in a house which was 99% full of Germans. Including some office ladies from the Gestapo... And apart from us I think there were only two Czech families and an excellent caretaker. My stepfather fought by his side on Old Town Square during the Prague Revolt. Together, we took bandages, mattresses, and other equipment to the Vinohrady hospital while the Germans shot at us from the windows of flats. Together with the caretaker we then made the rounds of the German office ladies in our house and asked them to give us bandages. They were like little lambs, of course. ‘Without a doubt,’ they said. One German lady shouted at me: ‘My grandfather was Czech!’”

“It was crucial to have information from the battlefield, to report on the current situation from the war, so that people knew what was going on and kept up their spirit. It was for a magazine called V boj (Into combat). I received a text from an illegal organization which I transcribed on a membrane. They gave me the membranes and that was all I cared about. These membranes were then handed in somewhere and they then printed it.”

“What the reprisals connected to the assassination of Heydrich meant for us? Fear – because you couldn’t be sure of anything. Only recently I discovered that one family from Nusle, that was executed in the course of the Heydrich affair, I knew well. It was the Bautzovi spouses, who were also given away by Karel Čurda. I lived in that house when I was a little girl. Interestingly, these people had nothing to do with politics but overnight they became victims – or heroes, if you will. These Bautzovi were such ordinary people, he drove a taxi, but they had no money, the lady would go halfway across Prague for cheaper meat. She worked, perhaps even before the war, in the Red Cross and the Red Cross must have reported their address to London and then Čurda went into hiding with them. There’s a little memorial standing at this house until today commemorating their execution. People said she was pulled out at night just in her pajamas.”