"The siren started blaring, I don't know why, that it was noon? Or maybe the sirens were blaring then and the stupid soldiers started shooting at it, at the siren, until they shot it down, somehow silenced it. But they started shooting up at the house and I just left the two little kids... Dominika was five and Filip was three, so I left them alone at home, I told them what they couldn't do and I went around the corner to go shopping. And when the shooting started, I was outside. I was so scared of where they were shooting, and the kids were scared too, and when they heard it, they sat down in the buttery. They were smart as little monkeys. They sat in the buttery on the potato boxes."
"In the apartment where I was the last to leave for school, my parents - they had already left for work, so someone rang the bell on the second floor. The houses didn't lock up during the day, not in Prague at all, not until ten o'clock at night. It was somehow relatively safe, or one had a feeling of safety, even adults, not only children. So someone rang the bell, there were two guys in those hideous leather coats, really like painted, the cops, and they asked if it was me, that they would wait for me, that I would go with them. They proved something, but you know, well, what year could it have been? Maybe 1958... So they'd wait for me downstairs. And I went down and they were waiting in this black Tatra 600. Well, of course I asked, but they didn't tell me where they were taking me and nothing: 'You'll find out...' It's terrible how afraid we were of them, just like that, that one didn't resist, didn't dare to resist. So two nasty men took me in a car and drove me somewhere."
"We were of pioneer age and with the Pioneer it kind of went through, no big pressure. But the unionists afterwards, not that they somehow forced us to join, not really, but how they were - a few of those very active unionists who wanted to stir up the unionist life at that school, mainly by singing and dancing. And they were always dancing in the streets somewhere, always wearing those blue shirts, it was quite horrible, but it was ridiculous, not that it should have annoyed anybody. On Arbesovo square, which Kořenského street runs into, there's a park there today, but there wasn't the park back then, the square was paved and there was nothing there. A circus came there, so there was always dancing excitedly 'Tomorrow there will be dancing everywhere'. So that was a strong impression of a bit of a madhouse."
"They explained to me that there would finally be peace, so we would have - dad said, 'We will have things that we don't know yet, like a banana, an orange.' We really didn’t know that at the time, or: "Imagine, Alenka – whipped cream!" That's what I remember, my dad used to tell me about such things that peace will bring."
Alena Winterová was born on 13 April 1938 in Prague to Bohumil Pourová and his wife Helena Pourová, née Rýzlová. Her father was the Secretary General of the Chamber of Engineers. After its dissolution in 1948, he worked as a clerk in a bank. His mother came from the family of Václav Rýzl, who had two laundry shops in Prague and owned half of a rented house in Podolí. After 1948 the shops were nationalised and he later had to give the house to the state. Both of the witness’s parents were social democrats, and after the coup they became members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). Alena Winterová studied civil law and, after graduating in 1961, worked for three years as a corporate lawyer in the Poetry Service. She then joined the Faculty of Law of Charles University (PF UK) as an assistant professor at the Department of Civil Law. In the school year 1967/68 she went on a doctoral scholarship to the Université du Soleil in Nice. In the 1980s, she was appointed associate professor and completed her habilitation in the early 1990s. She was one of the few faculty members who had never been a member of the Communist Party. After 1989, she became head of the Department of Civil Law, and in 1993 she was appointed professor at the Faculty of Law. For seven years (1990-1996) she served as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Law. For ten years she was the editor-in-chief of the monthly journal Legal Practice and for six years a member of the Accreditation Commission, which approved the fields of study at newly established universities. In 2020, she was appointed professor emeritus at Charles University and to this day (2025) she serves as a member of the Legislative Council of the Government of the Czech Republic. Until 2024, she was still lecturing and examining for state exams. In 2025 she was living in Prague.
