Elly Jouzová

"I ran down to the basement and met my grandmother running upstairs to get the suitcase. It was ending by then, though. The hardets hits were ones that hit a house in Libická Street. We lived in Radhošťská Street, and that goes on as Libická once you cross past Vinohradská. It was in our very street, just four blocks away; that's why it was so loud. When the final alarm sounded, I went outside with a neighbor, and though the sun was shining, there was this pink fog in the air. It was brick dust. We came to Vinohradská and saw a lady being carried from Libická opposite us. She was in a chair, her leg looked weird and she was moaning. We walked on towards Jiřího z Poděbrad Square, and it was closed. We weren't allowed to go any further because a bomb had hit the Maceška sausage plant. It smashed up several houses in Kanálská Street and it went on all the way down to Emauzy. The view was horrible. People were joking how 'smart' the Americans were to hit that house in Libická while there was a better target just next door where all the Germans lived. They only missed by one house. In fact, they missed by an entire city because the raid was supposed to hit Dresden."

"I guess we brought some underwear there and applied to visit my mother. This surprised me: she'd had short hair, shingled style, but by then her hair had been longer in a sort of ponytail, and there was a white streak amidst her black hair. The visit was weird because they were standing around, listening... What was I supposed to say? She was happy to see me but I felt weird and my mum looked weird too. Then she saw us once more. When they took her from the Waldheim prison, they took her to Prague to a prison in Charles Square. The prison's back wing faces a narrow alley close to the Lazarská tram stop. Somebody who had been released told us at home that she wanted to see us. My sister and I came there at a specific hour and walked the alley and looked in the shop windows. My mother had asked the warden to let her wash the windows, so she could see us through the windows. My sister saw her too, but they didn't tell me, so I didn't know I was to look out for her. It was only when we walked home that I learned that my mother had been watching us through a window."

"It was strange; we didn't get a letter from her. We took a train via Pardubice and an air raid had hit there. It was all broken, people were talking about the air raid, and I suddenly had a kind of premonition from what they said and from the fact that I had no news from home. When I got home, my grandma took me to my room. I don't know why they always told the bad news in the room... She sat down with me on the bare bed and told me the Gestapo had arrested my sister. They also arrested Miloš Hájek and their friends too. It could have been avoided because my sister wasn't in the organisation, in those 'fives' that made up the structure, but one of the boys, when beaten, said that there was this girl who was a friend of Miloš Hájek's whose both her parents were locked up. After that, they found her very easily. All my sister actually did was get somebody an ID card. They sent her to Terezín. In the meantime, Miloš Hájek's parents were hiding another young man in their house in Spořilov, and the Gestapo came and arrested him again and took the parents too. Mrs. Hájková returned but Mr. Hájek died in a death march."

“My father died in 1941. Well, we learned it, because a death certificate arrived. My sister took me to the room lifted me up to have me standing on the sofa so that she could reach me and told me that their father had died. But I didn´t understand it fully. I knew it was serious but didn´t understand what it meant because until then none of my friends or relatives had died. But I remember that my sister was crying and then she taught me to sing Kde domov můj (the Czech national anthem).“

“My parents stayed, they didn´t emigrate because my father was given tasks to do by the Party. So, before the Nazis came, he became the owner of the advertising company RIK - Advertising and Publicity – he even had business cards and used to bring home small toothpastes and small jars of jam. The company was probably a cover up to get money to pay for illegal work. When Hitler, came, I remember the terrible weather and how unhappy my parents were. My mother was unhappy as my father was away somewhere at the time and when we had visitors, they spoke in such a serious way. I noticed that and they saw I was serious as well and then they asked me what I was thinking about. And I used to reply – about everything. And they thought it was funny. I simply felt the atmosphere and that was really bad at the beginning of the war. My mother told me that when Ribbentrop and Molotov had signed the Non-Agression Pact that they (the Communists) were in a very difficult situation because these two who were supposed to be enemies, Stalin and Hitler, that it was the faith that the Party and Stalin that they were acting well. They saw some tactics in it, which in fact was more of a Hitler´s tactics than Stalin´s.

“At that time my father studied at the Technical University in Brno. He was to become an electro-engineer. He was sponsored by his mother´s brother Wallner who, I think, was the owner of a little factory at Vír. When Wallner learned that my father was active as a left wing politician, he told him that he´d better leave politics and finish his studies first and if he didn´t, he would stop supporting him. My father dug his heels in and left the university. He became a revolutionary working for the Communist Party. He was paid occasionally and we could live on that somehow, but I think it was not much because my parents only started to buy furniture when they were given a flat, and even after ten years the flat wasn´t furnished properly. My father was first in Ostrava, then in Prague. Before he got marrried, he lived at the Communist Party headquarters in Karlín. They told me that a dinner jacket and slept on a kind of a sofa there.“