Hana Vondráčková

* 1939

  • “I remember that during the air raids we had to run to the basement to hide, and I kept a shoebox next my bed and I had my doll there. My mom would thus always grab me, I would grab the doll and we would run down to the basement. There were about five apartments with families... Dad constructed a kind of a frame in the basement, and they placed blankets and duvets over it, and my parents slept there. For me, they tied two wicker armchairs together, and I fit in there just fine, and I slept in those armchairs. We cooked in the basement, too, and we simply lived there… The only thing we heard in the basement – I don’t know if you even know what a basement looks like – there was a small sliding window from the sidewalk used for supplying coal. When they delivered coal they threw it in there through that opening. We could hear the heavy armoured boots of German soldiers just a few metres away from us. They could have just opened the window, thrown something in there, and perhaps I would not have even been telling this to you today.”

  • “My dad worked in the bank in the Na Příkopech Street, and he went by tram to a funeral in Modřany, but he did not arrive there. The tram stopped by the Jirásek Bridge and they told the passengers ‘you need to take cover somewhere,’ and ‘let’s go, everybody, we will hide in that house on the corner.’ That was the closet place to hide. My dad and several other people ran down to the embankment; there were public toilets there. Perhaps they are still there, I don’t know. They hid in the toilets. There was an enormous blast, and he then told us that the blast wave was so strong that they all rolled on the ground. When it was over and they got out, the house where all the other passengers from the tram ran to hide was in ruins. None of them survived.”

  • “Then there was the Velvet Revolution, and our company worked a lot for East Germany and for Russia, and suddenly there were no contracts. There was no work to do. Girls, it was terrible, I can tell you. There were two years when I was going to work and I was unhappy because I had nothing to do! There was a punch clock, and we had to be physically present there. But we had nothing to do, and I was solving crossword puzzles and reading and nobody scolded me for that, because this was a hard blow for everybody. From the full activity we suddenly went to a state when there was no work to do.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, pamětnice doma, 28.04.2015

    (audio)
    délka: 01:02:31
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

After 1989 I was going to work unhappily every day, because there was no work to do. It was traumatizing for me

Hana Vondráčková
Hana Vondráčková
zdroj: Pamět Národa - Archiv

  Hana Vondráčková was born April 3, 1939 in Prague. Her father directly experienced the air raid on Prague on February 14, 1945 when the bombing completely destroyed the house near which he was hiding. He also took part in the Prague Uprising: as a baker by profession, he helped to provide bread for residents of Prague. After the war Hana attended an elementary school and then a municipal school in Braník, and then she worked as a draftswoman in the Chirana company. In 1962 she married and her daughter was born four years later. In 1968 she began working in the company ČKD - Semiconductors, where she worked at first as a draftswoman and later as a secretary. The company began to experience great difficulties after 1989 due to its major focus on contracts with East Germany and the Soviet Union. Together with her friends from Chirana, Hana purchased the former company‘s recreation lodge in the Krkonoše Mountains and she has been going there since then.