Archangela Anna Kunická

"We were supposed to get a diploma [at the medical school] in May 1945, but instead we got it in early April so we could [go help]. There were only about sixteen of us who intended to join the order, the other classmates were civilians, who immediately joined the concentration camps, etc. to help people. And then they were bringing people from the concentration camp to us to the Prague hospital. That's what we also experienced; I don't even want to recall it. They were living skeletons. It's something so horrible when you see a middle-aged man, a thirty-five-year-old, skeleton alive, and when he sees a clean bed, he hugs it and says, 'How long have I not seen a clean bed!' And just to satisfy all those people - when it was possible, whatever mattress was in the attic or anywhere, it was brought down to the hall and people were lying everywhere on it, both wounded during the revolutionary uprising, and many people from concentration camps, such as Mauthausen. Mainly men, but also women. For example, the mayor of Brussels was there - he was the one who knelt by the bed and hugged the white-bedlinen mattress. We already spoke German quite well at the time, and so did they, of course, but we spoke more in French with these people from the West who were in concentration camps, because they were very oversensitive to German. They accepted us in a much friendlier way with French than with German."

"We experienced the bombing. I experienced the bombing when there was a carpet raid that hit the General Hospital. At that time, I was doing my practical training there in a children's hospital. In the morning we went to practical training, we arrived, we got out, we went down the street, then there was the carpet raid, which destroyed the whole huge part of the city. At that time, I was doing my practical training in the maternity ward - the mothers, who were only two hours after giving birth, stumbled down to the shelter, we were immediately picking up the children and brought them there. And when we came out of the shelter, we couldn't tell where we were. Then we walked home - and because we had the uniforms of nurses, they let us go, otherwise we might not have gotten to Malá Strana through Prague. … It was such a terrible experience - because in the morning there were normal streets and you come back and everywhere were houses half-ruined. They also started bringing injured children, they were taking the adults to other hospitals, especially to the Vinohrady Hospital, because the General Hospital was badly damaged. Therefore, the Vinohrady hospital had to accept these severely injured patients, and there were not enough doctors for that. There was literally blood running down the stairs from the injured people before they received treatment, because there were not enough doctors for that many people. That was such a shock! The next day, when it was already possible to connect by a phone, they called, 'Please send us your trainees here, because they are bringing wounded children to the children's hospital and to the maternity ward, and we can't make it here with our staff.' So, we stayed there for the whole day, we only went home for the night, sometimes we even helped during the night service."

"When the Germans were arriving to the Castle, I went down Neruda Street and experienced the horror we felt when the Germans flocked to Prague Castle. And when we left school - I am from Letná, that is, we went home through the Castle - I saw Hitler standing in the window and looking at Prague. And that was something terrible. It was such a terrible shock when he stood in the palace of the kings of Prague and looked at the city. We said to ourselves: 'Our beautiful Prague. What will happen to it? The next day we went through the Castle to school and there were German soldiers and they started at us: 'Hat, die tschechische Raten!', or 'Czech rats!' After that we preferred to walk through Pohořelec, because we were already afraid to go through the Castle.

"We leaving the prison with the then General Superior, who had been there for eight years. We drove through Pardubice to the train station [and she said]: 'Wow, I can look out the window!' Because when they were transporting them, they were not allowed to look to the right or to the left, they were blindfolded and so on. And she was a woman who was really extremely brave and at the same time extremely intellectually superior. And now, as a small child, she was happy that she could normally look at the traffic around her. You know, it breaks a person's heart."

"Sometime in 1952 or 1953, the masters no longer knew how to deal with us, so they came up with the idea that we would be drafted into the military service as military paramedics. Then we said, 'Look, military service doesn't apply to women. In our country, military service is compulsory for men, not for women. You would have to make a new law that would make it mandatory for women as well. And since it doesn´t exist, we do not agree with that.' There are even large military barracks in Tábor, so from there various gentlemen came with batches to negotiate that we would have to go to join the military service. They also visited other hospitals. Saying that they even give us batches. We said, 'Thank you, but we won't do anything like that.' Then they even came to measure us for hats. It was absurd. But we still insisted, 'No, we don't do that, because we're not required by law to do military service.' The military gentlemen were there many times, but when we all insisted on this unanimously - we also reported to other hospitals in the South Bohemian region, where they also tried to do so - and when they saw that they would not persuade us, they stopped the hocus-pocus."

"None of the men came down, they stayed on those trucks. So, they called them off and negotiations began. And then it was achieved that half of the civilian teachers and half of the nuns would remain, that was the result that came out of it all. We had made three demands - first: we would be able to continue teaching according to our conscience, we would not be forced to teach something that would be against our conscience; secondly, we would not be transferred to another school; third, we would teach in religious dress. We set these three conditions, they agreed to it, and we had indeed been teaching since December 1, [1948], when all this was resolved. But then we found out that it was not possible, because whatever it was, something was always found wrong and the director immediately called: 'Colleague, look, this and that you said, it can't be done today,' etc. And not only this - everything was made impossible for the children - when there were some holidays, some festivities were made or a trip was organized, etc. Just so that the children could not attend church services. In short, everything that could be done to make it as difficult as possible for us, was done. So, at the end of the school year 1949, we resigned ourselves from school because it was made impossible for us to do what we agreed on with the principal, i.e. that we would teach according to our conscience."