Halina Holbová

* 1923

  • "At the time of its closure, I had to move out of Prague with two small children, two and three years old. I received absolutely no money and I lived from the charity of the citizens of the town of Letovice, where my husband came from."

  • "And there after the great hardships, like all the teeth knocked out. Kicks into the abdominal cavity, into the legs, as a result of which he got pulmonary and heart attacks. A surgery to remove the entire bladder. Constant thrombotic foot inflammation when he was treated in a Brno military hospital. After all the hardships and diseases, he suddenly died in 1953."

  • "And I have a tough memory of my uncle, Lieutenant Red, who did high school in Russia and was sent to the front to the military engineers. He received ten soldiers and was to teach them to demine an anti-tank mine. He showed them how the mine was being disposed of, but the mine exploded in an unfortunate accident, and all ten boys, including my uncle, were torn apart. We only saw shreds hanging on the trees. Shreds of flesh, bones and suits. And there was nothing of them left..."

  • "Not only the roads were full of mines, but there was also everything that was around. Straw bales in the barns which we needed for sleep. Grenades disguised by straw in the stove. Clay floors and there was tamped down clay. Also, when we crossed the threshold, there was a grenade or a mine under the threshold. Mugs on the table, teapots, buckets. Everything we wanted to use for our being."

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    Brno, 26.07.2004

    (audio)
    duration: 19:56
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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We never knew when we would go to the angels

Halina Holbová, née Šzymanowska, was born on December 12, 1923 in Puławy (Poland). She grew up in the family of the Polish officer Miecisław Szymanowski and the Volhynian Czech Libuše Červená-Szymanowski. With the outbreak of World War II, her father was taken away in 1939, after the collapse of Poland’s defense, he traveled to France and then to England, where he was treated for war injuries, which he eventually succumbed to. After his death, the witnesses with her brother and mother moved to relatives to Rovno to Volyn, where all three enlisted in the 1st Czechoslovak army corps in May 1944. The witness worked as an administrative assistant in the military headquarters and her mother became the interpreter of the General Jan Kratochvíl. The witness completed military training in Sadagura near the western Ukrainian town of Chernivtsi, and was subsequently deployed to the war front. After crossing the Polish-Slovak border, she was transferred from the typography to the 4th Personal Department of Colonel Apron and Captain of the Council, where she kept records of killed, missing and wounded soldiers. She went through the fighting of the Eastern Front to Prague, where a year and a half after the war she worked in Prague-Dejvice in the main staff in the records. She was demobilized on December 31, 1946. In Prague, she married the staff captain Antonín Holba, who fled to the West into the foreign army during the German occupation. He was released from the army after 1948 and subsequently arrested at the behest of the general and co-author of the army purges Bedřich Reicin. The detainee Antonín Holba was physically tortured in the so-called Hradčany House. He was convicted and imprisoned for several years in Pankrác and Opava. The witness and her two small children, aged two and three, meanwhile had to move out of Prague and lived in her husband’s birthplace in Letovice. The practices of communist crime had a significant effect on her husband’s health and he died soon after his release in 1953. For her military service, Halina Holbová received the Czechoslovak Medal for Merit of 1st degree (1947), the Soviet Medal for Victory over Germany (1948) and the Dukla Memorial Commemorative Medal (1959).