Jan Syrovátka

"As a kid, I knew there were some medals in the drawer. I knew my mom's medal was there and I knew my dad's medal was there. Dad got some medals after the war for his resistance activities, maybe even two, I'm not sure, but today they are probably in a museum somewhere in Brno. And my mother also had a medal, and I didn't know what for. And she didn't talk much about it, until one day I was cleaning the attic of the little house that used to be here, and this fell out and my mother told me. I was an adult then, so she confessed that at the end of the war, when the Prague Uprising started, she worked as a nurse for Dr. Valšík down in Vysočany. And now the shooting was going on and Dr. Valšík needed her, she arranged with him to help in that hospital that is mentioned there, I don't know a little bit if it was the pharmacy that I mention here, just with the medicines that were available, she needed to get through that German roadblock and how to do that? She had a Hitlerjugend uniform, that's something like the Pioneers in socialism or the Boy Scouts today, but the Hitlerjugend were from the word Hitler, they were Hitler's boys, underage boys who were trained in arms and they were everywhere there were German garrisons. So my mother got the uniform of a member of the Hitler Youth because they were getting rid of it, throwing it away, they wanted war, they didn't want to be identified. And dressed as a boy, except my mother had beautiful long hair, so she got a haircut and crossed over to the side where the insurgents were through the German barrier. Well, I still get chills when I remember that the Germans could have shot her, that they knew she wasn't one of their own, and they could have snitched on her too, because they saw the uniform. My mother survived and got a medal for that."