"We were going on a trip to Lednice on 20 August that year. Ready, still with friends, prepared. The gentleman, the friend, was in the army, and he came to us at midnight, rang the bell and said, 'The Russians are coming here.' So my husband immediately went to the theatre union, and I was watching the radio. Then we went to the town to see, and the only thing I experienced there was that actually from that tank, or from that car, the Russian was pointing at me like that, and I said, 'Well, either he's going to trigger it or he's not.' Because I think we were there shouting or something. They were threatening us. So there was a very dramatic moment there. I was scared. Then I remember another encounter like that, we were walking home and there was this little group, a group of these Russians, and they were looking at us in a frightened way and asking us where they were. I spoke Russian quite well, so I tried to tell them and they were amazed because they really didn't know what was going on."
"That Mrs. Placha prepared me for the conservatory. I went there to a play in Prague with my father and it was 27 May 1942. While I was there introducing myself as a pianist, there was an assassination. So there was a big commotion in Prague, everything was closed everywhere. My father was not allowed to leave Prague at all, and I was sent in the night by some train full of German soldiers to Kolin, where my mother had been waiting at the station since the afternoon for my return home. That actually ended a kind of prelude to my career as a piano player, because we said that times were so terribly uncertain that nothing could be done. I remember that time awfully well. I know what followed, that in that one pub in Kolin, Na Zábradlí, there were these things on display that belonged to the assassins, and we had to go there and look at them, and say if we had seen them, if we knew who they belonged to. We had to go look around."
"And when the war was over, briefly, for a few days in May, a skinny old man came to us with a still skinny lady and a few people like that. And he came to us and said, 'I am Mahler'. He came back, I don't know if from Auschwitz or where he was, or from Terezín. Just his lady, they had a beautiful villa in Cologne, she divorced him and he met a lady there in the concentration camp and they said if they survived the war they would get married in Cologne. And they had nowhere to go at all. He had no home, nobody. And he came to us and asked if they could do the wedding at our place. So I'm writing that my brother went to get some milk, my mother made some cake, some bundt cake. And these skinny gentlemen from the concentration camp spent their wedding day with us."
Věra Sokolová, née Kubečková, was born on 13 October 1931. Her father, Bohumil Kubeček, was one of the men who were mobilised from the Czech Crown countries into the Austro-Hungarian army. He met his future wife Ludmila Osebig in Yugoslavia during the First World War. Věra Sokolová suffered from polio in her youth, from which she was cured by the Liberec doctor Löwy. She took piano lessons with the Jewish teacher Karel Mahler, who was replaced by Professor Blažena Plachá after his deportation to a concentration camp. She prepared Vera for the conservatory exams. She left for the rehearsals on 27 May 1942, the day of the attack on Reinhard Heydrich. However, the consequences of her illness and the hard times during the Second World War meant the end of a promising career as a pianist. She studied music education and worked at the Ministry of Culture and the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem. She founded a pedagogical institute in Liberec, where she taught until 1966. She worked as an accompanist for the Ještěd choir and founded the Cantemus women’s choir, which received worldwide acclaim. Her husband František Sokol was for many years the head of the Liberec Naive Theatre, worked in the Union of Czechoslovak Theatre Artists and from 1990 to 1998 served as Deputy Mayor of Liberec for Education and Culture. In 2022 Věra Sokolová lived in Liberec.
