Zdenka Kadlecová

"Then I had friends there. I was a wandering child. Rokoska was such a deserted residential area, where there was one car, it was owned by a vet from the Prague slaughterhouse, otherwise there were no cars there. There was a tram number three, it went once every half an hour and no cars except some coal truck just didn't go there, it was quite a forgotten place. I know that even at my three years, or later at my four or five years, they used to send me shopping. Today it's an arterial road and it's just a hell of a place. And because of that... my mother was employed, my father was employed, so we had a lady who did the laundry - once a month, once a week - I don't remember. But the lady used to go there and she had to get some food. And at that time I always had to go shopping and I'd go to the butcher for two sausages, so obviously my mother wasn't very generous, but I'd go to the butcher for two sausages. And one time I went to get the two sausages and the butcher was closed and I had to walk far, almost all the way to the tram station to another butcher to get the two sausages. And because I was a wandering child, I wandered. There was a kind of Praganda, a factory, and I had a friend there too, but she was already in school, so I was wandering around and I saw a group of three men standing there. So I forgot about it and I was sliding along the wall and suddenly a car was driving along the intersection. These men had something in their hands, and they ended up throwing a bomb. It was Heydrich's car and I was probably the only witness to the assassination of Heydrich."

"I have a terrible memory of that. It's a terrible thing, but nevertheless, I used to make commercials for television at the time - apart from the documentaries. There was a new advertising department, Mr Marvan was in charge, and I did various commercials for him. We did all kinds of things. In that naive way - looking at it today, it wouldn't have worked. And I had an assistant from university at the time, and he was riding a tram on Wenceslas Square at the moment when Jan Palach set himself on fire. He came to the editorial office and said to me: 'Look, someone burned himself to death in Wenceslas Square, I thought you were shooting a commercial there again.' So he told me what had happened, but he didn't get off the tram because he thought we were filming a commercial there."