Ludmila Sýkorová

“Mum used to joke about it. She was ill as a child, there weren’t any pills back then, right... Penicillin, antibiotics, and various other types of medicine... She went through all the infectious children’s diseases, but usually it was two at a time. It was a miracle that she’d survived. The doctors always told her mother: ‘Anything can happen, I’ll come again tomorrow, but prepare for all eventualities.’ And my mother wondered: ‘What is Mum supposed to prepare for?’ The next day, when a smiling mummy opened the door for the doctor, straight in the doorway he’d say? ‘We’ll be okay. She survived the night.’ Apparently, that happened several times in her childhood, and so she’d say: ‘I escaped the gravedigger’s spade so many times that they’d already ticked me off the list up there, and now they’ve forgotten about me.”

“One of those days Dad supposedly agreed to meet up with my brother in Old Town Square, on the corner of Železná Street. They were to meet at thirteen oh-oh, that is, at one in the afternoon. Our family is quite well known for its tardiness, and the fact that my brother came late saved his life... Dad actually came there early: he was walking along from the direction of Rott’s, and it seemed strange to him that the place where he was to meet with his son was strangely full of milling SS men. So he hid and just watched the place from a distance. And supposedly, at precisely one o’clock, they took up machine guns and shot all the people who were there. Dad ran there, terribly afraid that he’d find his son there, but [my brother] was only just coming up from Tyl Theatre at the time. He’d heard the gunfire, so he also hid in one of the houses there, and when things were quiet, he went to Old Town Square.”