“The worst thing I experienced there was when I was on night duty with another girl; it was at the time when there were already air raids on Nuremberg. I stood in the door and said to her: ´Hey, it looks like there will be an air raid.´ The searchlights were searching for planes. I didn’t even finish saying that and there was an awful blast, and I flew out. I was burnt and bruised. It exploded right next to us where the girl was standing. I haven’t seen her since that moment, she probably lost her life there.”
“As I was going by train, suddenly you could see train cars standing in railway stations, with people in them – from the concentration camps. They crammed them into the cars so that you could see only their heads. Now they didn’t know what to do with them. In Stod there is a large grove, a park, where they shot them all in order to get rid of them.”
“There [in Zbůch – ed.’s note] was a camp similar to the one in Nuremberg which housed the captured Russians who had to work in the mine. They wore striped rags, even in winter, wooden clogs, and their life there was miserable. Then a donation campaign was declared, aimed especially at young people – nobody had anything, basically, but people gave us what they could and we carried it there to help the prisoners a little bit: some medicines, food, and clothes. Of course, I and my sister went there too. But my body was so terribly weak that I contracted some infection there. In a few days, I ran high fever of 42°C, herpes, and I was at the point of dying. My parents were desperate, and so was my sister. The German doctor had been killed, as had been all the Germans, allegedly there had been a massacre in the village. I didn’t even want to know about it. Now there was no doctor. My sister thus walked up to the Americans to ask if there was some doctor there, because I was so terribly sick. They recommended her to go to the monastery in Chotěšov, where the main garrison was. She rode a bike to Chotěšov and she really managed to communicate with them. We all knew some German, because we had to learn German at that time. Thus she told them what she needed and a doctor came there, an older man around forty, who could speak German, and another younger doctor. They came there and when she told them everything about my state, they grabbed her bike, made her get into a jeep with them and they loaded the bike in it, and they arrived to us. When they saw how bad I was, they gave me some pills and said. ´Give it to here every four hours – during the day, at night, during the day, at night.´ Now I know that this was the first penicillin I have received in my life. At that time nobody knew about penicillin yet. In two weeks, my health was slowly improving and I was getting better.”
Libuše Hittmanová, née Königsmarková, was born March 28, 1923 in Zbůch in a miner’s family. After completing her elementary studies, between 1937-1940 she studied the Baťa School of Work for young women and then a two-year trade academy in Pilsen. On April 13, 1943 she was sent to Germany to do forced labour. She worked in an ammunition factory in Fürth near Nuremberg where she was handling dynamite. She has survived an explosion in her workplace, but it has left her with permanent health damage - she is blind on her left eye. In spring 1945 she was transferred to an ammunition factory in Holýšov. In May 1945 she was helping liberated Russian prisoners in Zbůch and since her body was very weak from the forced labour, she contracted an infection in the Russian prisoners’ camp and nearly died. American doctors, who gave her penicillin, have saved her life. After the war she married Josef Hittman, whom she met while doing conscripted labour in Nuremberg. They settled in Karlovy Vary. After the birth of their daughter and her maternity leave she found a job as a secretary to the director of the District Authority of Public Health in Karlovy Vary, where she continued working until her retirement. After the death of her husband she moved to her daughter’s house in Mariánské Lázně and while retired, she still worked for several years as a receptionist in the spa facilities.
