"Kralupy was raided in March 45, shortly before the end of the war. The planes that flew over us were English and American planes that bombed here. Earlier, we used to wave and welcome them from below. But one day they came and started bombing Kralupy. There was this seamstress in Slaný - in those days, everything was re-sewn during the war, and my mother had her coat re-sewn for me. I was fifteen years old, almost, or fourteen and a half. I went to Slaný that day to the seamstress to get the coat, and I was coming back to Kralupy on the noon train when the air raid horn sounded. They didn't let us into the station, but the train stopped on the edge of Kralupy. There was a factory where they made the fuel... what's the name of it? It's slipped my mind. It was just a factory processing oil and diesel and so on. They wouldn't let us into the station, but they stopped us in front of this factory, which was on the outskirts of Kralupy, and in front of it was... there was a big meadow between it and the railroad. When the air raid alarm sounded, all the people jumped off the train and lay down on the ground. A German soldier told me to lie down on the ground. It was in March, it was muddy, and I told him - I spoke German decently enough - that I couldn't lie down on the ground because I had a new coat; i was just coming from a seamstress. It was a new light grey coat, and it was muddy. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down. There I lay for the 30 or 45 minutes during the raid."
"Then we went to Kralupy. We lived in Prague earlier, but my dad was a member of a saboteur group. He worked with the railroad, and there were groups that sabotaged the steam locomotives by cutting the pipes through which the steam went into the engine, thus actually putting the locomotive out of service. His boss got the message that there was already a threat of exposure; he worked at the Vršovice station - so his boss dispersed all the group members, transferring them immediately to different towns, to Nymburk, to Lysá nad Labem, and we went to Kralupy."
"On September 1 [30], when the war broke out, I was playing in the yard and my mother came from shopping and came to me in the yard and said, 'The war has started, it's terrible.' I didn't really understand; the word meant nothing to me, but she said the times were going to get tough."
Anna Vodrážková, née Jiráková, was born in České Budějovice on 30 October 1930 to Anna Jiráková and Miloš Jirák. Her father, a mechanical engineer, lived in St. Petersburg during World War I, working in a local arms factory. Her mother spent the same period in Udine, Italy where she worked as a teletypewriter. From 1942, the family lived in Kralupy nad Vltavou where Anna Vodrážková witnessed the bombing on 22 March 1945. After the liberation, the Jiráks returned to Prague where she continued her high school studies. In February 1948, she and other students participated in a student march in support of President Edvard Beneš. She graduated from a medical school. Between 1956 and 1977 she worked as a physician in the tuberculosis ward. She collaborated with the World Health Organization (WHO) on tuberculosis research. She joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) in the 1960s but was expelled in 1969. Between 1977 and 1990 she worked as a regional medical statistician. She lived in Prague in 2024.
