"[Archbishop Josef Beran] said: 'Be careful, there are provocateurs among you, there are children here, be careful of the children so nothing happens to them. Don't let our children suffer any injuries.' Then there was a terrible whistling in the [St. Vitus] Cathedral. Terrible whistling and shouting: 'You serve on America's money' and all that. It's just horrible. And he was saying: 'Calm down.’ But it didn't matter. So, the mass ended and the priests tried to push the archbishop to the exit. So, we followed them of course. Now the provocateurs were shouting there, well, I've just never seen that in a cathedral, that people would shout like that."
"When the Prague Uprising began, they sent my husband - they were in a cellar somewhere, the cellars were connected in Veleslavínova Street - to go and negotiate, that he knew German language. The Germans were based in the Faculty of Law, so they went there with a white flag to negotiate, and they didn't talk to them at all: 'According to international law, you are insurgents.' And they locked them in the basement. So, he sat in the basement after that, and he went through a lot of fear."
"We welcomed the first tank there near the brewery. I know there was one [woman] there with a big flower, so: 'Give him a kiss!' So, there she was hugging the Russian. So, that was the first tank that came there. But after that it was more like military supply unit, horses and stuff. They camped around Humpolec and they pastured the horses. Well, it was pretty wild there. Even some of the girls took it pretty hard. You know how it goes when the army comes. It was the gamekeeper's daughter, she took it badly that time. Well, and there was shooting in Humpolec. The next day. We welcomed the army, the new national committee was already in the Dolní náměstí, and we welcomed, waved at the Russians. So, we went content to bed in the evening. In the morning there should have been be a wake-up signal, a band would go through the town. My parents woke up and said: ‘The wake-up signal will be in a moment.’ Yes, the wake-up signal! There was shooting. There were SS men hiding in the woods and they wanted to go through, but our army was already there and the Russians were already there. So, there was a lot of shooting. We were huddled, hiding, because there was shooting all around us - we lived right next to the church - so there was shooting everywhere. And there were quite a few dead."
Věra Vencovská, née Kunstová, was born on 13 September 1929 in Humpolec. Her father Bedřich Kunst was a was veteran of the World War I, who fought in fronts in Albania and Croatia. Věra Vencovská spent the first twenty years of her life in her native Humpolec. During her childhood, she was a member of Sokol and together with her father she was active in Czech Tourist Club. In 1945, she experienced the exchanges of fire and arrests during the liberation. After graduating from girl elementary school, she started studying in grammar school in Humpolec, where she was taught by Bohumil Vít Tajovský, who was a victim of communist repression in the 1950s. At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s she studied at the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague. In 1950, she married Prof. František Vencovský, an economist, long-time colleague and friend of Karel Engliš. Together with her husband she lived first in her native Humpolec, from 1961 in České Budějovice and finally from 1969 in Prague. She devoted her entire professional life to teaching. Věra Vencovská died on 17 September 2022.
