“I have a recollection from to the war. I was probably in the third grade, and we had a wonderful teacher and he allowed us to disturb a little during the class. We were a one-classroom school from the first to the fifth grade. There was a sharp knock on the door and a man in a strange-looking uniform entered. There was no television then and so we looked at him curiously. He was an SS man. The teacher introduced him to us and we were to sing the German anthem Deutschland, Deutschland über alles in his honour. It seemed completely ridiculous to me. I don’t know why, but I started giggling, in a girlish fashion, in the presence of the SS man during the singing of the German anthem. The teacher came to me, he did not say a word and he slapped me so hard that my forehead hit the desk, I was not too tall. When the class was over, he took me to his little teacher’s room. Not to apologize to me, but to assure me that I had deserved it. That all of them could get punished very much for that.”
“The commander of the retreating German army was Schörner. And Schörner’s army was hell of an army. Even its remains caused quite a mess and they were retreating through here, which means that they passed through Voznice. There was a scare that they were taking cattle and that they were searching for food. That they would just stop and storm into the village. Grandma thus had this awesome idea that we would leave our house open so that they would not break our door and we would hide under the spruce tree. We had beautiful spruce trees, with branches reaching to the ground. Each of us thus lay down and hid under the spruce tree. I don’t know whether I considered this an adventure or whether I was scared, but grandma’s idea was probably reasonable, and I was not scared. In my memory, barking of dogs is mixed together with the barking sound of the German language. They were really so curt; I knew that this was German, because from time to time I could hear it from the radio and I started to feel anxious. And I could hear that the barking was drawing closer, the German barking, which reminded of a rustling sound, and even before I began to feel afraid they had left or they went somewhere else, I don’t know. After a very long time… I can still see my grandma crawling on her knees, but using only her legs and one hand, and she was holding her butt with the other hand. I don’t know exactly, but they were prodding with bayonets and, I don’t know, but they pricked at my grandma’s butt and she thus had a bloody scratch there.”
“I have one nasty memory from December 2, 1948. One night the light came on and some stranger came in. He literally yelled at me to get out of the bed and he started searching my bed. Under the bed, or rather a couch, there was a storage drawer which could be pulled out. He started going through that drawer and I could hear two men, two voices, yelling at my father. But I don’t know what they were shouting at him. Meanwhile, my brother had been born in 1947, and now my mom was pregnant again, and she was standing there in the door in a night robe and she was completely scared. And then I saw dad’s back and three men behind him. The next time we saw him was the following May. He had probably been in detention pending trial, but he had certainly not taken part in any covert activity or some scheming. I don’t think that a man with two children and a third child coming could dare to be so brave and do something like that. But still, it is an unpleasant memory. Can you imagine how a Christmas tree looks in April? The Christmas tree was simply waiting for dad. He returned in May and he was talking to us, but it was somebody else who returned; the man who returned was not my father like he had been.”
We have survived the Nazis and then there came the communists
Edvarda Valentová was born July 5, 1937 in the family of an editor of Lidové Noviny newspaper Edvard Valenta. After the arrival of the German occupying forces the family had to move from Brno to Voznice in the countryside. Edvarda spent the years of WWII there. In 1945 the family moved to Prague, where her father began working for Lidové Noviny again. Edvarda’s father was arrested after the coup d’état in February 1948. After half a year in detention prison he returned as a broken man. Edvarda completed her studies at grammar school, but due to her father’s past political activity she was not allowed to be admitted to the study of medicine which she had dreamt about.
