“As we were not used at all at air raids in Prague, I myself, being home alone, watched how they flew over and thought to myself: ‘So, if they started bombing, so they – there is the Waltrovka factory near Jinonice, there they make those things for airplanes so they would bomb that one.’ That was my childish or half-childish train of thoughts. ‘And then they would fly over there at Malvazinky and past Malvazinky, there, down under Pavlák, there’s the Smíchov train station so they would bomb the train station.’ And this way, it was settled for me of sorts and so I watched them approaching and approaching – and now, they did not bomb Waltrovka so I looked at Malvazinky and thought: ‘And what’s falling of those airplanes, such little black balls? What are they throwing off them? Those are not, that’s not silver.’ But those balls landed at Malvazinky and, well, Malvazinky blew up in the air. Ne street there was blown up. That’s how I understood it, actually, what had happened. Because, metaphorically speaking, those houses just flew up in the air, that’s what I could see from that hill under the Strahov stadium.”
„My dad walked down the garden and Mr. Deiml went along. Two gentlemen were chatting. Mr. Deiml was holding a wooden rake for raking hay and it was a bit bloody because one of the dents broke and he wanted to carve a new one and set it there and he cut his hand. But that’s besides the point. And how those two gentlemen walked, I was curious and joined them to listen what they were talking about. And daddy asked Mr. Deiml: ‘Why don’t you move to Switzerland when you have your money deposited there, you would have something to live off?’ And Mr. Deiml answered him: ‘But we have this house here.’ And this one sentence cost his family their lives.”
Stanislava Žabková, née Čadilová, first saw the light on the 19th of December in 1932 in the St. Apollinarius hospital in Prague and she was an only child. With her parents, Václav and Jarmila, they lived in a residential neighbourhood above Klamovka in the Smíchov quarter. In February 1945, she observed bombing of Prague from the balcony of their flat. In 1948, she took part in the XI. Universal Sokol Mass Gymnastics Festival at Strahov. After basic school, she went to the a secondary school of social and legal matters near the Rudolfinum concert hall and she worked in this field for a year. In 1953, she got married and with her husband Miloš, a pharmacist, they moved to Vizovice in Moravia. Here she attended a librarian school and for long years, she managed the local library. She and her husband liked to travel within Czechoslovakia and the Socialist countries but with some help from acquaintances, they managed to travel to the other side of the Iron Curtain. Stanislava’s husband was a notable figure in local cultural activities, he established the Plum Harvest festival and the Circle of Friends of Music. From 1989, Stanislava has been creating decorative objects from the so-called Vizovice pastry [a local traditional product; the dough is made of fine flour and vinegar and baked, the result is hard shiny material which is not actually edible] for three decades. In 2022, she lived in Vizovice.
