Jiřina Jedličková

“I actually did get into accepted into medicine, I had a report card full of the best marks, but I didn’t get permission from the healthcare service. They wrote me that I should not plan on being accepted into studying medicine. I don’t understand where, at only eighteen years old, I found the courage – back then the Ministry of Health was in Vinohrady, so I hurried over to track down Minister Plojhar. Well, you know, the naïveté of an eighteen-year-old girl – of course I couldn’t get to him. But I got to his departmental boss, which happened to be from Brno. And I told him what an injustice it was that I was active in the ROH (Revolutionary Trade Union Movement) and they won’t accept me, and this other girl, who was just in the SSM (Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth) and didn’t even take the tests got in and had permission and so on. He looked at me in astonishment and led me to the central personnel agent of the Ministry of Health and three days before the October registration I received my permission too.”

“For me, my father was the person who guided me toward a moral life. When he could, he went on a walk with me every evening and we talked together. We lived on Grohová Street and right around the corner on Údolní (Street) there was a house where Docent Peler lived, where we also went together. I played with my classmate and my father always talked together with Mr. Peler. When I found a small pistol in 1945 which he had in his nightstand, where I was strictly forbidden from going around, I realized that he was obviously passing on some messages from his brother-in-law, which was a head of the partisans at Novoměstsko. And when during the occupation a car would stop at our house in the night, my mother always ran to the window and looked out to see if it wasn’t the SS men. It was clear to me that if they happened to come to our house, that they would shoot my father, along with Mr. Löw Beer or Mr. Neumark, the honorary British consulate, because he hated physical pain and it would have definitely been like that. Thus my peace-loving Dad’s pistol.”