“And a time began when people wanted to help, but they could not do so. Maybe they changed road directions. For example, they changed the directions to Jičín to Hradec. So they drove round and round. Then we had such an event, I will never forget it. Under the post office, when going down the hill, you all know it. You go there to the bus station and one road leads to Popovice and the other to the other side. Moreover, there was a crowd of people standing there, and as soon as the tanks came, they stood to one side, so they had to go where there were no people. Since they had the direction indicators reversed, they were back in five minutes and people were already standing on the other side - and they drove around like that several times. Well, it could not take forever. We all believed that it just could not be. That is how I feel and I say, it is in fact the deepest and worst memory of the year 1968. Even worse was that they shot two people up here on Letná, they have a small memorial there. Whenever I drive by, I look and remember. After that shooting, we all started to kind of split up because they were afraid. Unimaginable fear, I was afraid to let the children into the city. I was afraid that they would go somewhere.”
"Mom put my little sister in a stroller, put her in front of the house where we lived, and I was supposed to watch her. So I rocked her a little, but I didn't enjoy it very much and I left somewhere. And suddenly the mother started to scream terribly - and now everyone who was around rioted, because the pram was empty, without the small, two-month-old baby. A terrible search began and already such great sadness that someone had taken her, someone had stolen her or that something had happened to her. Now imagine that one soldier there took her from the pram, went to our bedroom, lay down there, put the baby on his arm like that, and both of them slept there. And then he explained to us that when he went to war, he also left a little girl like we had there at home, and that he didn't know what happened to her in all these years, whether she was alive or not. Those were such sad stories of those soldiers."
Bohumila Naušová, née Navrátilová, was born on October 15, 1935 in Židovice in Jičín. Her father worked as a groom on the Bradáč farm, where the Navrátils also lived. They spent the entire war on the farm, and Soviet soldiers were housed there during the liberation. After finishing primary school, the witness entered grammar school in Brno, which she had to leave after the communist coup in 1948, as the whole family was forced to leave the farm and moved to a small apartment in Jičín. Here she continued her studies at the pedagogical school, and after finishing it she got a placement in Hodkovice nad Mohelkou and then back to Jičín as a teacher. In 1968, after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, she and her husband participated in non-violent resistance against the occupiers. At the end of the 1980s, she enthusiastically participated in the events of the Velvet Revolution. In 2020, she lived with her husband in Jičín. She died on December 21, 2023.
