"We were in the basement and someone came in saying that a barricade was being built, that tanks were coming at us. So we ran out. I mean, my parents held me, but I didn't stop. And we were carrying blocks. Someone had already started it, and they were tearing out the blocks and building this big barricade."
"I know I had a twelve o'clock date with a boy I was dating. And so I was going to go on that date. But that's when dad came in, he was employed at the library in Clementine, and he came home and caught me in the hallway and told me I wasn't going anywhere, that there was some kind of uprising. So I stayed at home. Otherwise, I don't know how I would have turned out, because I had a date at Ludmila's in Vinohrady, so I would have actually come to the worst. So I stayed at home for the whole revolution. I know we hid in the basement, too. And we watched how it would turn out."
"We were even there with a friend, we were walking around Prague in the afternoon like that, and we were even there once, and then we were like, by that time the paratroopers were already there, in the underground, and we were in that church."
"I was, it was the afternoon I found out, I was in the park with the girls. And we were fooling around in this way, there was this row of benches, chairs, and there was a man and a lady and we were fooling around so much that they picked up and left. There were about four girls, I don't remember who they were. And I came home and my mother told me that they had killed Reinhard Heydrich. Well, right after that in the evening they started arresting. I know martial law was declared. You weren't allowed out, so nobody was allowed out from nine o'clock. Anyone who went out, they shot him or took him away for interrogation. So I remember we were looking out the window, the streets were empty, it was so scary. And then the disasters of the Heydrichiad began, every day they reported in the evening who had been executed. Right somehow in those first days we heard at ten o'clock, I remember, like today I remember, I was already lying in bed, my parents were listening to the radio and they were reporting that Dr. Jan Frček, that was my dad who was employed in the library and he was like his superior, that Dr. Frček. So I remember I didn't sleep that night that I heard that because I knew him too."
"Because he was a theologian and they sort of didn't like the Bolsheviks, didn't they, they didn't like priests. They were knocking it out there, too. So he ran away too and he wanted to get in touch with a friend here in Czechoslovakia. And that he would join up with some Ukrainian army that was forming somewhere in Slovakia or Moravia. But he stayed here. He didn't go to Moravia anymore, he stayed here."
Naděžda Navrátilová, née Michalčuková, was born on November 18, 1927 in Prague. Her father, Nikolai Michalchuk, came from Volochisk, Ukraine, where he studied theology. After the October Revolution in 1917, he fled to Czechoslovakia to escape the Communists. He got a job through the YMCA organization and later became a librarian at the Slavic Department in Klementinum. He did not return to theology, but raised his daughter in the Orthodox faith. Naděžda Navrátilová remembers the proclamation of the Protectorate and the demonstration on October 28, 1939. She experienced hunger and fear during the Nazi occupation and vividly remembers the empty night streets during the Heydrichiad. She visited the Orthodox Church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius at the time when the paratroopers who successfully carried out the assassination were hiding in its underground. She also knew the chaplain Vladimír Petřek, who helped them and was executed. In May 1945, she wanted to meet her boyfriend in Vinohrady, but her father detained her - the Prague Uprising had begun. The family hid in the cellar and Naděžda later joined the construction of the barricade in Žižkov. After the war, she studied pharmacy, graduated in 1950 and worked as a master in a pharmacy all her life. At the time of filming, she lived in Žižkov, Prague, and was ninety-eight years old.
