Marta Hájková

* 1926

  • "We children knelt before the altar. The space in front of the pews up to the altar was filled. We didn't even have a place to kneel. Everything was packed. The pews were numbered and each family had a number in their pew. Even if mum or dad came later, that seat was theirs. Unoccupied. If my parents didn't make it to church or couldn't go for health reasons, they offered a seat to a neighbour: 'We won't go to church tomorrow, you can sit there.' Because every family had just one seat. Either my father or my mother went to church, but we children were not allowed to sit in the pews. We knelt in front of the altar."

  • "It was a cottage right by the woods. They kept cows and cattle in the cellar. And that's where my sister and I always hid. Because it was in the woods, that they wouldn't bomb there. Every day we ran to that cottage, but that one day the alarm was just at noon. We were having lunch. We were sitting at lunch and didn't go into the woods. And there was a direct hit there. There was nothing left of the cottage. The people... the stuff on the trees. Cows. Everything. There was nothing left. The people stayed there. Grygarčík family. Only the oldest one, her name was Danuše, wasn't at home. She was in town. She was the only one left alive. Otherwise, all the inhabitants..." - "Did you go there to see?" - "There was nothing to see..."

  • "I had the bad luck of starting my first year in the first municipal school, and it had to be interrupted because Hitler came. I went back from the first class of the municipal school to the primary school, and it was starting all over again. So we have blackouts in history. I don't know anything about Czech history, because we didn't learn that. We started learning German. Schiller, Goethe, German history. We had it easier with German because our parents were part German. They spoke German until 1918. During the First Republic they had to speak Czech, but they didn't speak Czech, they spoke Prajzsko region language. But we had to learn Czech. And no sooner had we learned some Czech, by 1938, the war started and we were speaking German. So we learned German, and in 1945 we had to speak Czech again."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Ostrava, 19.05.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:21:22
  • 2

    Ostrava, 20.05.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 02:06:01
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She dreamed of dancing at the celebration. Then Hitler came instead of the king

Marta Hájková, 1930s
Marta Hájková, 1930s
photo: witness´s archive

Marta Hájková was born on 8 September 1926 in Lhotka near Ostrava. Her father was a gunner in the Oskar mine, her mother took care of the small fields, children and household. Marta Hájková spent her childhood in the conditions of the First Republic in a village located in close proximity to industrial Ostrava. She grew up on the left bank of the Odra River, which separated Ostrava from Hlučín. Like most people in the Hlučín region, called Prajzsko, she spoke a dialect. She started to learn written Czech only in the municipal school. As a result of the Munich Agreement, in the autumn of 1938 Hlučín region fell to the Third Reich and the children had to go to German schools. She remembers when the men from Hlučín joined the Wehrmacht, the boys became members of Hitler’s youth and the girls members of the German Girls’ Union. In August 1944, she luckily survived the Allied bombing of Ostrava. In December 1945 she travelled to Vienna to pick up her father from Russian captivity. From 1946 onwards she worked briefly in the Krnov region, where she witnessed the expulsion of the German population. In 2024 she was living in Lhotka.