“The Horáček family lived in Pankrác in two attic rooms. On the 7th of May, Vlastík went to pursue SS men that came from Benešov, from the Green Fox. They shot him at the entrance door right opposite his house. He was trying to hide there but nobody let him in. When I came to their house, his mum took me to the Czechoslovak Hussite Church in Nusle. The fallen barricaders were lying on the tables in the prayer room. And Vlastík was one of them. It was my worst experience during the Prague uprising. There is a plaque next to the door of the house in front of which he was killed, and the nearby street and school are named after him.”
“We were also evicted from the company flat in Vyšehradská Street. It was when my father´s colleague reported him for spreading leaflets and my father was arrested by Gestapo. He was imprisoned in Pankrác and they took him to interrogations to ‘Petschkárna‘ (the Petschek Palace). We lost the flat, moved to Petřiny but our father came back. They let him go at the then Ministry of Justice Krejčí´s intercession. A neighbour and his colleague Franta Šmíd ended worse. He was a communist. Even today, I can still see how they came to take him. He took a little bag and they went away. He did not come back.”
“It was on the seventh or eighth of May. We were laying down in the field over the Břevnov Monastery. Today it is overgrown but there was only ploughed soil at that time. And I was sniping the farm building below. The Germans had barracks there. Two other men were closer to the wall of the cemetery. A Jindra Kulíšek, year of birth nineteen-sixteen and Honza Jarolím from Liboc. He was forty years old. Both of them died.”
Václav Jiterský was born on the 11th of December 1927 in Prague. The family was evicted from the company flat of the Supreme Administrative Court in Mariánské hradby Street to Vyšehradská Street, after the occupation of Prague by German occupants on the 15th of March 1939. He studied State reform real grammar school in Velvarská Street in Prague 6 and Smíchov secondary technical school in Preslova Street. He witnessed the Nazi armed raid on Czechoslovak parachutes hiding in the crypt of the Saints Cyril and Methodius Cathedral on the 18th of June 1942. Towards the end of the war, the students were called to dig trenches because of the approaching front; he worked near Suchdol upon Odra in northern Moravia. He ran away from the forced labours with his friend Vlastík Horáček. His father was shortly imprisoned by Gestapo for alleged spreading of anti-German leaflets in spring 1945. Václav participated in fights during Prague uprising, he sniped a German garrison in Břevnov monastery with a machine gun and he helped to escort it from Prague to Hostivice. His friend Vlastík Horáček died during the uprising and so did some of his fellow fighters. Václav Jiterský died in 2016.
