"They went there with their bare hands. Alenka had a folder for drawings, Kája a small backpack. Nothing more, bare hands. Their passports were taken on the ship, they had no documents. Well, they applied, then they went to a refugee center in Austria, they were there for about ten days before it was found out who they were. Then, they were placed in a boarding house. It affected us terribly. So, they made it possible for me to go and talk to my daughter. So, I went to Vienna by bus. They were waiting there somewhere. I was supposed to persuade them. Well, I knew beforehand that it was pointless. At least I saw them. They assured me that everything would be fine. I didn't know that at the time, so I returned home unhappy. Then they allowed my husband to go as well, and finally they allowed my second daughter to go as well. Nothing helped, no one changed their minds.
"I remember one case. A colleague who worked in a pharmacy in Nová Huta got herpes. Not ordinary. Getting it in the eye or near the brain is very dangerous. There is a special medicine for this, which was not available at that time. Nowadays it is. I remember the so-called extraordinary import when the medicine was approved for her. But before they agreed, before they arrived with it at the border, I have the impression that at the Austrian border, the colleague died because she did not receive the medicine in time. Today there is a medicine for it, which, if taken, helps."
"The two of us were returning from dancing classes alone. We were approaching the house and the so-called flares were already falling, we called them little trees. They irradiated the terrain, because there was blackout everywhere. And the bombs started falling. We ran home to the first floor, then rushed to the basement, and in the meantime the bombs were already falling. We learned that one person did not make it to our door and that the bombs tore him apart. He died. The second experience was when we were sitting in the basement during the bombing. Dad prepared it there, that we had coal there, we spread old blankets, sheets, planks on it, so we could lie down. Once we were sitting there by the wall when the bombs fell directly and one hit was the Čapkova sokolovna, where the German garrison was. There was a terrible massacre, everything was broken. It threw us off so much that we thought we had a direct hit too."
Věra Holubová, née Přikrylová, was born on December 9, 1928 in Ostrava. During World War II, she witnessed the bombing of Ostrava. She studied pharmacy, married Oldřich Holub, whose family ran a pharmacy in the Ostrava district of Radvanice. Plans for them to work there were thwarted by the February coup in 1948. The pharmacy was nationalized and the family then faced numerous setbacks from the Communists. One of Věra Holubová’s two daughters, artist Alena Foustková, emigrated in 1984, which caused further difficulties for the family. Věra and Oldřich Holub worked in pharmacy all their lives. When they got the pharmacy back in restitution after 1989, they started running it again. In 2022, she lived in Ostrava.
