“This is how I got to know Smrkovský. When I later reported to Prague he had already sat by the phone and when this woman from Prague said: ‘Revolutionary Committee Benešov is on the line’, he thought he was speaking to the director of Benešov’s Revolutionary Committee. In fact he spoke to a post officer who spoke from a meat store. He guarded the road leading from Benešov, waiting for which turn would the tanks take. He only called me after they turned towards Prague. That was something. The tanks had been on their way for only ten minutes when Prague received the message. When I later told Smrkovský, he wanted me to come to Prague and tell him the whole story. When he invited me over for the first time, I did not go. So he called my boss to send me there. There was a fuss at the post office: ‘Vlasta, some minister is calling’, they told me.”
“I would later tell him everything I got to know from the inter-city communications. He then told me: ‘You need to go up there and tell me all of it again.’ We would always meet somewhere at the stairs. I used to go up to the first floor; the post office was in the ground floor, so we would meet somewhere there by random. When I told him that Hilda’s brother-in-law was coming again, planning to stay for three days, he instantly reported it to Prague to reduce all activities. So that there would be no action because it had been known that with Eichmann arriving, all the railway stations and junctions would be swarming with cops. So I told them some two or three days ahead that Eichmann was coming for three days. Later, I also reported on what they had for lunch and which Czechs have visited them. Even Czechs would come to visit Eichmann. If he invited them, they had to come, there was no other way.”
“Franta ran there, saying immediately: ‘There are 93 tanks here, they left just now at five o’clock and they are taking this and that road. They have ammunition and cars full of soldiers on the side, all of it heading towards Prague. They are sending everything that goes to Prague to the roadside in order to clear the road. When Franta finished talking, I pulled out the wire. I thought to myself: ‘If that soldier, who connected my call from the local office, listened – tanks, cars… - he will shoot me.’ I can tell you that I got scared for the first time ever. I waited because the Germans were still walking around, whispering. At that time I had not known that when I passed the news on to Prague, Prague began instantly calling the whole city to set up barricades on this and that street where the tanks were to be expected. So that people would take tools and go there, using also the trams to barricade all of it. In order for the 93 tanks not to get to Prague. I had not known then that even the Benešov Gestapo was connected to Prague’s broadcast and heard it.”
Vlasta Trávníčková, née Hniličková, was born on 22 October 1922 in Bavorov and grew up in Volary. Her father was a police officer and the family would thus move around often. In 1929 they moved to Lhenice near Budweis in southern Bohemia. Vlasta graduated from a Realschule in Budweis in 1941 and took up a job at a post office. On 1 May 1943 she was assigned to a post office in Benešov which was at that time a region of a Waffen-SS training grounds. Thanks to her knowledge of German, Vlasta was able to transmit information about the situation inside the training grounds which she obtained in her job, to the post office manager who supported the anti-Nazi resistance in Prague. Among other things, she informed about Adolf Eichmann’s stay in Prague because her colleague was Eichmann’s sister-in-law. During the Prague Uprising of May 1945, Vlasta Trávníčková passed on an important message on the departure of tanks and armies from the Waffen-SS training grounds in Benešov in Prague’s direction. At present, Vlasta Trávníčková is retired and lives in Pilsen.
