"Sometimes the psychiatrist would send [patients] to me, sometimes they would just come to me. I know that once [Václav] Havel was just being rescued there - it was not yet known [who he was]. So they sent him as well – I think he had been detained in the spring – and the GP… They released him because he had pneumonia, so the doctor sent him to all departments, including psychology and psychiatry. So Havel ended up sitting with me too. My boss told me about it – he was that kind of person – because right away the hospital director called him, demanding that he send over Havel's medical records. And he replied: 'Psychiatric records are not shared.' And since he knew the director would get them anyway, that they had keys to all the files, every time Havel came in, he simply wrote: [date] – depression, [next date] – depression, and nothing else."
"I had a feeling of absolute freedom [in my job in the psychology department], I did what I thought was necessary, and mainly we protected the boys who were about to go to military service. Often through the psychiatry department they could get a green book." - "Blue book." - "So it was more like that... possibly even help."
"[The communists ordered my father] to close it [the shop], so he cleaned it out and put up the Rudé právo [with a mention of T. G. Masaryk] from March 7. And when he was fined for that, he wrote to Zápotocký that he had been fined for the Rudé právo article, that he did not consider Rudé právo to be an anti-State publication." - "So Dad took the paper from 1937 when Masaryk died?" - "No, March 7, still after the war, so it always said March 7 about Masaryk, so it was a fresh paper. And so my father bought it and put it up, he covered the whole thing with that Rudé právo where Masaryk was."
Věra Břicháčková, née Vodenková, was born on February 14, 1936 in Prague to Františka and Ladislav Vodenka. She spent the first years of her life in Zadní Třebáň near Beroun. In 1942 the family moved to Beroun, where her father rented a shop. The end of the war was spent in a small village near Skryje in the Křivoklát region. When the authorities ordered his father to close his shop in 1952, he posted an article about T. G. Masaryk in the window. As a result, the family was evicted from their apartment by the regime in 1953. Věra Břicháčková had trouble getting admission to high school, and eventually enrolled in a medical school in Kladno, where she was accepted on the condition that she be ideologically re-educated in a boarding school away from her parents. In 1957, she began studying psychology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (FF UK). She worked as a psychologist at the outpatient clinics for adult and child psychiatry in Prague 9 and Prague 6. She worked as an expert witness in the field of health care, clinical psychology and psychiatry at the Department of Health of the Municipal and Regional Court in Prague. In 2025 she lived in Prague.
