"On the way back, when we were going from Prešov to Hungary, we got hit by a train twice. On one occasion we had to hide in a field somewhere in the sheaves. We had fun. Then it was at night - and that was worse - fighter jets over the train.... The train had to stand, no light, nothing, and now just the horror of the planes just shining, they were bombers. That's when I was scared and I prayed not to let it kill us because it was terrifying."
"I also remember that during the Heydrichiad, when I was four and a half years old, my brother was probably only three, the Germans did searches in families, so we had one of those. We stood in the hallway, my brother, me, my mother, my father. Dad had this paperweight on the table in the room - a gun - and so this one German fired. Then they opened the closet and unfortunately Dad had a military uniform in there. So I still remember that they asked whose it was. So dad said it was his, and then I don't know anything. I didn't remember anything. Except that they took my mother to a psychiatric hospital in Bohnice. But I didn't find that out until I was an adult, that the German had made us such a... My aunt came to look after us and my dad had to go to work. She said: 'The blankets were torn, the mattresses, all the drawers were thrown out.' They were just looking for a gun, because they knew the soldier would have one. He had one, but not at home. Then he told the story himself that he had it in the attic. It was a kind of apartment building with two entrances, but it had one attic, one cellar, one yard, so somewhere in the attic, on a beam, far away there, that he had a pistol stored. Then, when the Prague Uprising came, he took it."
Květoslava Večeřová was born on October 14, 1937 in Chust, Subcarpathian Russia. Her father, Josef Novák, served there as an officer in the Czechoslovak army. Shortly afterwards, his father was transferred to Šumperk, where his wife Žofie and little Květoslava came to visit him. They did not stay long because the town belonged to the border area occupied by Nazi Germany after the Munich Agreement. Therefore, at his request, the father was transferred to Levoča, Slovakia, the birthplace of his wife, where the family also moved. However, Slovakia declared independence in March 1939 and the family moved to Prague. In 1942, during the Heydrich raid in Střešovice, the family experienced a house search that could have cost the father his life for hiding a gun. In 1944, six-year-old Květoslava and her younger brother Vladimír spent their holidays with their grandparents in Levoča, Slovakia. They returned home by train during the fighting of the Slovak National Uprising and twice experienced air raids by dredgers. At the end of the war, the father joined the Prague Uprising. In 1945 the father returned to the army and went to serve in Šumperk. In nearby Hanušovice, he is said to have been deployed to fight with men of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who were trying to get out of Ukraine and into the West beyond the reach of Soviet influence. In Šumperk, Květoslava graduated from the secondary medical school. She married Adolf Večera, and between 1959 and 1962 the couple had two children - daughter Květa and son Zbyněk. From the second half of the 1960s, the family lived in Rovensko, where her husband worked as a director and her mother-in-law as a teacher in the local school. At the time of filming in 2024, Květoslava Večeřová lived in Šumperk.
