“During the war I went to high school in Kladno. We remember the 10th June – when Lidice was burned down. The Lidice women and children were accommodated on the premises of our high school and we wouldn’t go to school during the week. We weren’t even allowed to walk by on the pavement. Not possible. And when we came back to school, our, the older children’s classroom walls, and the younger children’s too, read: “Mum, where are you? Where are they taking me? I am scared here.” You know, they carved that into the walls with something, last messages of the Lidice women and children. We had a hard time returning there…”
“I remember that the transport almost didn’t work the first two days in Ústí. You had to walk everywhere because the buses and trams couldn’t operate. In Ústí, all the signs for Prague were turned to point to Děčín. And those who came by tanks or cars, here it was mainly the German army, saw the direction to Prague, followed the signs, and they would end up at the German border again. And during the first days salt, sugar, and shoes were bought out in mass. Because people were afraid that there would be some war again. And those were the essential things for life – sugar and salt were the most important for the kitchen. And when you have a thin pullover, thin clothes, you can survive that, but try walking around in winter in thin buckle shoes. That would be much worse. But then it was terrible for us to see cars with German speaking soldiers (because the DDR was in the socialist sector). We saw the German soldiers with the bayonets pointed out. You know, in everyone who was a bit older and remembered the Germans arriving on 15th March, that evoked terrible memories.”
“Hello, my name is Klára Blažejová. I was born in 1924 and I’ve come here to share some of memories about my life. You know, truth is a relative notion and we all have our own truth. Just a small example – today I will say that I’m cold, you can say you’re feeling hot. You are right, I am right. So the perspective a person uses when looking at what happened goes always through this filter, and this concerns not only the period of time but also the environment from which the person came. My father was an engineer, my mother was a lawyer, I was the only child. So, using later terminology, I was a member of a bourgeois family. A family that didn’t consist of manual workers and wasn’t deemed socialist by the people in power then. Because I was alone and my parents were wealthy I could spend my time doing sports. I enjoyed figure skating and later I worked as a figure skating instructor for twenty years. I passed skiing exams. I visited foreign countries from a very young age. And that stuck with me to adulthood – passion for sports, passion for travelling, and last but not least, a passion for books.”
Klára Blažejová was born on 4th October 1924. She spent her childhood in the Dejvice quarter in Prague. She was the only child from a so-called bourgeois family. Her father was an engineer and her mother a lawyer. Since her parents were very wealthy, she could dedicate her time to sports since a young age. She took up figure skating and later taught skating as well. She went to school on Prague‘s Vítězné náměstí from 1930. She lived in the capital until the World War II broke out, after which she moved to Kladno to go to high school. After the village of Lidice was burned down on 10th June 1942 the Lidice women and children allegedly lived on the high school‘s premises. Following her graduation she was forcibly deployed to a munitions factory Týnec nad Sázavou. After the war Klára studied pedagogy and after many years of teaching in the Ústí nad Labem area she helps children in Chomutov with learning to this day.
