"Once, in the spring, there was no train arriving from Prague. We were at the station, there were many of us from all directions, but no train. Then we learned that Heydrich had been shot in Prague and that no trains were allowed to leave Prague so that the one who did this to him could not escape. We didn't know anything. The dispatcher in Beroun was sorry, at about five o'clock in the evening, we were hungry, he gave us a freight car behind the locomotive and drove the locomotive towards Příbram to take us away. The carriage was open on both sides, since we wouldn't have the strength, he wasn't allowed to stop the train, the locomotive. So on both sides, it was cold, we drove along and it was cold in the carriage and the train conductor always stopped at the station and we jumped to one side or the other where we could."
"I remember my mother waking me up in the morning, that the war was over in 1945. And that I was running to the square, there was the Red Cross, and they gave me a red bag. The cross was white, I had bandages, iodine tincture, some backfills and I walked around Příbram. And I witnessed events. I went across the square and at that time many cars of Vlasov group were driving past there. They drove sharply across that square and I witnessed one Vlasov member being shot dead there. And do you know where? Where the labour office is today, there was a large brick fountain, a clothing store on the corner, so one of the Vlasovs was shot on the corner of the square. I know I wanted to run there and they waved at me that they didn't need me because he was already dead."
"Then they took it from her, she didn't get anything, so she was home. I then married after the war and started living in Prague, where we would have stayed for ten years. But my mother followed us to Prague crying and begging us to return to Příbram, because the Uranium mines were opening there, and my mother was alone in the house; they gave her two part-time workers to stay there. One was Slovak, from Slovakia, who was said to be constantly drunk and perhaps harassed my mother. My mother was afraid of them, so she always cried, when she came to Prague, so we returned to Příbram."
Marie Turková, née Kratochvílová, was born on June 13, 1924 in Příbram and had a ten years’ older brother Adolf. Father Jaroslav Kratochvíl worked as a tax clerk in Pražská Street in Příbram, mother Marie, née Smrčková, ran a general store in Dlouhá Street, where the family also lived. His brother enlisted in the army in 1938, and returned home after the Munich Agreement. During the war, he joined the resistance within the guerrilla group Death of Fascism under the lead of Captain Olesinsky. Marie started a two-year business school in Příbram in 1939. In 1941 she joined a cooperative school in Beroun, and soon moved to the school of women’s professions. She commuted daily by train. She was totally deployed in the sanatorium in Pleš near Dobříš, where she worked until the end of the war. Her brother took part in the last war clashes on Slivice. Marie helped out as a nurse during the liberation of Příbram. After the war, she married Jaromír Turk, they moved to Prague and Marie worked at the U Bílé růže pharmacy in Jilská Street, where she was in charge of serums. After its nationalization in 1948, she worked at Spofa in Žižkov. After 1948, her mother’s shop in Dlouhá Street was confiscated and two temporary workers from the newly opened uranium mines moved into her house. Marie and her husband returned to Příbram, where they both worked in the Uranus mines, her husband as a planner, and she was employed in the accounting office. He recalls August 1968 and the general fear of war. As part of the redevelopment of the old town, their house in Dlouhá Street was demolished, which they had recently repaired. He remembers the gathering on the square in Příbram in November 1989. She died in 2023.
