Jana Stehlíková

"Everything was on command. In the evening we were told that there would be no sauntering, that the bed time was at nine o'clock and that everyone has to sleep. No going to the bathroom at night, for example, that we are politically advanced and that we realize that we can't bother anyone. That's how we understood it and no one was sauntering, because everyone was hiding under a blanket, with tears, because we did not know how it would go on, because it was getting pretty awful. A wake-up command in the morning, from the gallery of the professor: 'Doves, get up, there will be a warming up!' So, each one of us stood by her bed. We stretched our arms out and sideways, we blinked, turned our heads from side to side, raised one leg and the other hand. And that was our warm-up. That was the beginning of the day. Then we lined up and went to school in pairs. During the march we were singing the songs that built socialism. A school care taker was waiting at school, he gave everyone a tin mug of milk or coffee and two dry rolls. We stood down the hall of the grammar school and there each one of us ate the rolls. Then the radio said, 'Comrades, break up into your classes, there will be political news.'"

"We experienced times of air raids, for example, because there was a war. My grandmother and I always ran to the end of the garden, and my grandfather built a temporary shelter there. It was a pit about two times two meters, high about a hundred and sixty. He somehow covered it up, he put some planks, the dirt and the turf on the ceiling, and we thought we were in a shelter and protected from those bombs. I didn't experience the bombing myself, but we saw it in every movie, in the editorial that was in front of every movie. There was always a victorious German army, there were bombings, houses fell, it was terrible. My cousin's grandmother experienced a raid and bombing in Vinohrady. It was just before the end of the war. I remember that people were literally rummaging through the ruins of the house and that I also took part as a little girl and that we only dug up her alarm clock, a few pieces of dishes and nothing else."