“Before the war mainly German people lived in Frýdek, however people did not argue and got on quite well… it was good to live there. Jews, Germans…, some people from Vienna, and Polish people. (Laugh.) With Germans, before it started, it really… for example, about three German families lived in our street, one Jewish family, he was a doctor and then two old ladies lived there: a mother and her daughter, the mother was more than ninety years old, and the daughter was in her seventies. They all got along so well there and helped each other during the war. The Germans also helped the Jews. I remember that Mrs. Geriková used to bring them some packages and threw them over the fence at night so that nobody would see her because it was forbidden to help them. It was the doctor´s family, they had two little children. It if had not been for the war, everything would have stayed the same there without any problems.”
“We were before the end of the war… There was a campaign, I do not even know who organized it so that children could go to Morávka… I mean to a sanatorium. So many of us went there. There were about two hundred children and meanwhile the war ended, so we came back… We came back, it had ended in Frýdek several days ago; we returned about two days after the end of the war… I can remember … I think that he was a captain, I mean Kostikov, whose body was lying there on a raincoat. He was covered with flowers and a memorial is there nowadays. He was a nice person. Of course, there were more fallen soldiers around him. We arrived home at that time, my mum survived the war and my dad died during the war, so we did not have anybody else. I remember that the garden was trampled, the fence was broken, the house was upside down because they (Soviet soldiers) also spent the night there... Then they helped my mother clean it all up when we arrived, so it was all pretty quiet after that."
“Suddenly there was a bright light, so my mum ran out on the balcony, of course, we children woke up too, our dad was not alive at that time. We were just looking at it, we did not know what was on fire, and in the morning, we got to know that it was the synagogue…They had a school which we also attended next to it, the school did not burn out. The thing is the Germans had occupied the weaving school where I attended the first grade and the Germans had occupied it during the war, they had their classrooms there and they gave us an old German school under the presbytery which was dilapidated. And there was another old school in Bruzovská (Street).” “Suddenly there was a bright light, so my mum ran out on the balcony, of course, we children woke up too, our dad was not alive at that time. We were just looking at it, we did not know what was on fire, and in the morning, we got to know that it was the synagogue…They had a school which we also attended next to it, the school did not burn out. The thing is the Germans had occupied the weaving school where I attended the first grade and the Germans had occupied it during the war, they had their classrooms there and they gave us an old German school under the presbytery which was dilapidated. And there was another old school in Bruzovská (Street).”
Květoslava Foralová, née Matyšková, Scout name Mývalka, was born on 5 July 1930 in Frýdek. Before the war mainly German people lived in Frýdek, however, everyone got on well with each other - Jews, Germans, some people from Vienna, and Polish people. She together with other two hundred children was in a sanatorium in Morávka before the end of the war. They returned home about two days after the end of the war and saw Kostikov lying there dead covered with flowers and some other fallen soldiers around him. Her father died during the war; her mother survived it.
She joined a scout troop in 1946 and she was its member until 1949. The small scout troop in Frýdek Místek was founded by Růžena Hrachovinová, their clubhouse was under the arcade upstairs. She attended several nice camps with Brownies. One of them took place in 1947 in a log cabin in Prašivá. They used to go to Čupek hill which was their favourite hill. The troop started to fall apart because Růža Hrachovinová lost interest in it and Mývalka started to commute to Ostrava. She went there at 5 a.m. and got back in the evening. She registered the displaced Germans, it was a lot of people, a room full of cards. She worked on it for about two years. Before it, she had worked in the District Office in Frýdek in the civil security department.
She moved to Prague in March 1951, and she met her friends only when she went to visit her mum. She got married to a soldier Radek Foral, whom with she studied at grammar school. He graduated from Military school in Chrudim, and he worked for Air Force until his retirement. Currently, he is seriously ill after a head injury.
Květa Foralová wishes today’s Scouts fulfilled the Scout Promise.
