“I’ll tell you one thing, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. When you’re in solitary confinement, you don’t know where your dad is, you don’t know where your mum is, you don’t know what’ll happen to you, you don’t know anything. I really did beat my head against the wall. When I was in the cooler, they gave me corn cakes and some dirty water that stood for soup. I threw that all into the toilet, so I grew terribly thin. The only thing in my cell was the toilet, which I blocked up. So they have to move me from the one cell to another, another solitary one. It was really dreadful. You know, the worst was that you weren’t afraid for yourself, you worried about your relatives - you don’t know where everyone is, you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know what happened to your mum, what happened to your dad - it was terrible. After about two more days they decided it was unsustainable to keep my in the cooler any longer, so they chucked me in among the women. There were six of us there, and I spent almost a week there. The girls got some food or packages from their families, I didn’t get anything, of course. Our Czechs kept back, of course, they didn’t even know what had happened to us; they had an idea we were locked up, but what...”
“So we lived through it, and the next morning the shooting stopped with the explosion that knocked me off the sofa - in short, it was morning, around six o’clock I guess, and all was quiet. Can you imagine you’re on the front, and suddenly everything goes quiet? I can tell you that I remember that the silence was perhaps even worse than when I could hear the shooting. Just an absolute silence all of a sudden. So - aged seventeen - I got up and went outside. Mum groaned; there were some elderly people on the floor below us, Serbs, who owned the housein fact. I ran down the stairs, I remember that we had a kind gardenette in front of the house, with about four steps leading down. I ran outside, and I looked around, not a soul in sight, everything closed - you can imagine, there’d been shooting everywhere, so everyone was hiding somewhere in the cellar or boarded up in their homes. I ran outside, and I remember there was a vocational school or something next door, and the entrance to that was around the corner. It had four steps you had to go up to get inside. I rushed in, not a soul in sight. Then I looked, there was a girl sitting on the steps, a partisan, and a bomb here, a bomb there, ammunition or goodness knows what, and a gun slung over her shoulder, and there she sat. When they liberated Sarajevo, they left these guards up wherever they passed by, so I knew that the partisans had gone through our street without us even knowing it. But the thing is that our students had guided them there. So they hadn’t shot at us, at our house, they knew where they were going, they knew where the Germans and the Ustashas were hiding. So I later found out - I don’t know if it’s true, but I guess it is - that the whole Gestapo HQ, which was fleeing from Sarajevo when it was clear that they’d lost, that whole train was supposedly blown to bits. So all the people who had questioned me... I guess it’s true. They really did know things were grim, so they were fleeing. And the partisans blew up any train they saw was full of escaping Ustashas and Germans. So the people who interrogated me were probably killed in the end.”
Vědunka Režná was born on 22 April 1927 in Zagreb, Croatia. Her father, Vojtěch Režný, had been sent to Rijeka in 1912 to teach the children of Austrian sailors. He married a Viennese Czech there, and she gave birth to their daughter, Vědunka. Due to a conflict with some Slovak compatriates, the family moved to Sarajevo. Besides his official employment as an educator, her father was also an active journalist and was intensely engaged in supporting his Czech compatriates. When World War II broke out in 1939, he wrote articles against the Nazis. When Yugoslavia was attacked in 1941, he started doing intelligence missions for the Allies with the support of partisans. In spring 1944 he was arrested, imprisoned, and in February 1945 he died in Dachau - although the family did not find that out until later. In January 1945 Věda and her mother were also arrested by the Gestapo. Young Vědunka was kept in solitary confinement at first, which was a horrifying ordeal. After further imprisonment in a cell with strange women, both she and her mother were finally released. Soon after she witnessed the liberation of Sarajevo. Her mother immediately began to search for her husband, despite the terrible postwar chaos. In the end she allowed herself to be convinced that the only way to find out anything about his fate was to search for him from Bohemia. Mother and daughter left for Czechoslovakia by the first repatriation transport. Under dramatic circumstances they finally managed to find very humble accommodation, and it was not until some time later that they met a friend from the Czech community in Yugoslavia, who told them the sad news of the father’s death. Vědunka found a job as an accountant - a profession that she retained until her retirement. She was happily married - her husband’s job even made it possible for her to visit her beloved Yugoslavia.
