Vlasta Šedivá

“It was crucial to have information from the battlefield, to report on the current situation from the war, so that people knew what was going on and kept up their spirit. It was for a magazine called V boj (Into combat). I received a text from an illegal organization which I transcribed on a membrane. They gave me the membranes and that was all I cared about. These membranes were then handed in somewhere and they then printed it.”

“I acted as a messenger between Prague and Brno, in 1944 I became a regular member of Předvoj [Vanguard]. Předvoj was made up of the extreme left-wing youth, it also included the Evangelical youth from Smíchov. The members were from seventeen to twenty-three years old. They published the magazine Předvoj, they supplied me with foils, I wrote texts into the foils and gave them back again. It was all the more risqué because I lived in a house which was 99% full of Germans. Including some office ladies from the Gestapo... And apart from us I think there were only two Czech families and an excellent caretaker. My stepfather fought by his side on Old Town Square during the Prague Revolt. Together, we took bandages, mattresses, and other equipment to the Vinohrady hospital while the Germans shot at us from the windows of flats. Together with the caretaker we then made the rounds of the German office ladies in our house and asked them to give us bandages. They were like little lambs, of course. ‘Without a doubt,’ they said. One German lady shouted at me: ‘My grandfather was Czech!’”

“What the reprisals connected to the assassination of Heydrich meant for us? Fear – because you couldn’t be sure of anything. Only recently I discovered that one family from Nusle, that was executed in the course of the Heydrich affair, I knew well. It was the Bautzovi spouses, who were also given away by Karel Čurda. I lived in that house when I was a little girl. Interestingly, these people had nothing to do with politics but overnight they became victims – or heroes, if you will. These Bautzovi were such ordinary people, he drove a taxi, but they had no money, the lady would go halfway across Prague for cheaper meat. She worked, perhaps even before the war, in the Red Cross and the Red Cross must have reported their address to London and then Čurda went into hiding with them. There’s a little memorial standing at this house until today commemorating their execution. People said she was pulled out at night just in her pajamas.”

“I was writing texts for the resistance for publication in Rudé právo, which was then illegal. These were various texts, for example that it was already necessary to prepare the national committees, the Košice program. I really raced in typing, I wrote very fast and every week I passed a membrane scribbled with text to Natasha in Dlážděná Street. We had an agreement that should she not be there, I’d come again the next day at the same hour. Once she didn’t come and thus I came there the next day. But she wasn’t there again. After a few days, I learned that both of the girls had been arrested. It was in October 1944. I can tell you that I was afraid as hell!”