Věroslava Bojková

* 1926

  • "They had a bunker. After the war it was modified and made accessible. Whether it is still there today, I don't know. You climbed into the bunker from the top, there was a tree, you had to lift it up and climb down through a hole. After the war they fixed it up and made a door so that children could be brought in to see what it looked like inside, in the cave where [the partisans] lived. Then they used to go to Hrabova, there was a big bunker there too. During the summer they were in the woods near the Rose Valley. There the Germans chased them..."

  • He was in Busin with a farmer. He didn't want him there anymore, well, he was afraid, I must say. What a connection it was. His father worked with my mother. So he says to her, 'He doesn't want him there anymore, I don't know how we'd do it.' So I went to see the boys [to the partisans] at the reunion, so I said, 'Could he come there?' And they agreed. So back home again. Mum told Dad, Dad told him and arranged what time it could be. Again it had to be arranged in detail that he was coming from Busin and I was coming from our place. We met as the intersection from Bohutin with that state road, and we followed them to Rovensko. Well, yes, but we came to Postřelmůvek and Postřelmůvek was full of German soldiers. You know, we were so shaken up... So we grabbed each other under the arm and yoo, yoo, yoo, yoo, yoo, yoo. We went together. He didn't come back, he stayed with the boys. I still don't know how I got home. I don't know... I don't know."

  • "All the windows were either demonted or opened, and three guns were set up in our present garden and aimed at Chromeč, saying that they would blast it as the Russians advanced. Before they did this, we had nothing cleverer to do, and we climbed up on the hillside and watched the Germans run away. Come on, we laughed. The bridge next to Chromec was not blown up yet. The Germans took off their clothes and left everything on the porch. They wore only the shirts, the boys. I didn't have anything more diligent, I went out, put on their uniform, cap, belt, pistol. Now I come into the kitchen, open the door, point the gun and say, 'Hände hoch!' What a stupid thing to do... Well, they jumped on me, took my gun. The laughing was over. I was laughing my ass off. I don't know if it was armed, if it was loaded or not. But at that moment I was disarmed, and they were undressed. That's as stupid as a man can do..."

  • “He just finished his vocational training in the Olšany paper mill as an electrician. They had to sent one worker to the Todt organization to construct bridges in Russia. He was the youngest one there and so he had to go. He even waved to us as he was leaving on the train. He got all the way to Poltava and then they were retreating from there. But the war front was moving there, and back, and there, and back again, and he remained with some Volhynian Czechs. But then the war front returned again and those people were transported to Germany to work there. He thus came to Germany under a false name of a brother of that Volhynian woman. He was not able to write letters home from Germany, and so he wrote a letter to somebody whom he trusted. The guys who worked in MEZ Postřelmov company took documents from a guy who had escaped to the partisans. They issued documents for him, certifying that he was doing some construction work there, and he was thus able to arrive home. He arrived home at night, but we were hiding one partisan in our house and I was on duty in Libina, and the two guys were hiding in our place. We kept locking the door all the time, and one day one of them needed to go to the toilet, which we had on the veranda, and meanwhile a guy from the village, who talked a lot, came there.”

  • “Whatever bread she had at home, she cut it all into pieces and gave it to them. They were supposed to spend the night at her farm, but I don’t know where they slept, because I was afraid. I had a small room there. The German woman gave them whatever food she had at home so that they would not be hungry. I don’t remember anymore if those prisoners were Russian or English.”

  • “When my brother arrived home from Russia on a leave, he brought a friend who was in Russia with him, and he brought some of his friends with him. And I started dating one of them and we eventually walked down the aisle. He was a car repairman by profession and he worked in Zábřeh. When the Gestapo came for the first guy, somebody ran into the workshop and warned him that they were looking for him. They opened the window in the workshop and he jumped out. Then they closed the window and they scattered some metal chips around so that nobody would notice that it had been opened. The Gestapo men were searching for him and the other employees said that he had probably gone to see a doctor. But the others who had been involved in this as well had to escape, too. There was nothing else for them to do, because if they were after one of them, they were after all of them. They were making cars for Germans which were sent to the war front. They knew what to do so that the cars would later break down, but that they would leave the workshop in a perfect condition.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    byt pamětnice, Bohutín, 14.04.2017

    (audio)
    duration: 02:00:52
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Bohutín, 18.07.2017

    (audio)
    duration: 02:25:13
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 3

    Šumperk, 18.05.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:17:19
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Love between bunkers of partisans

Věroslava Jurajdová (Bojková), historical photography
Věroslava Jurajdová (Bojková), historical photography
photo: archiv pamětnice

Věroslava Bojková, née Jurajdová, was born on June 26, 1926 in Bohutín in the Šumperk region. During World War Two, in 1942, her brother Mnislav was drafted to the Todt organization and sent to work in Ukraine. During his only short leave when he got home, Mnislav brought some friends with him, and one of them was Václav Bojka. It was at that time when Věroslava got acquainted with him. Václav then kept visiting her regularly, walking from Rovensko which was seven kilometres away. He lived in this village and he was also active in the local illegal anti-Nazi group, which was organized under the National Association of Czechoslovaks Patriots. In April 1944 the Gestapo came to arrest Václav Bojka. He escaped through the window, he joined the partisans and he was hiding in forests until the end of the war. However, he secretly kept visiting his beloved Věroslava. She was handing over messages to the partisans, bringing them food and repairing clothes. Václav nearly lost his life in one of the last clashes of the war, during a fight for an electric switchboard station in Ráječko. A shrapnel from a grenade missed his heart only by several millimetres. Fortunately he survived and in 1946 Věroslava and Václav married. Their daughter Věra was born in 1948 and their daughter Miroslava three years later. Václav Bojko died one month before their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1996. In 2017 his wife Věroslava Bojková still lives in Bohutín.