Růžena Horáková

* 1924

  • (Q: “How many of you were there?”) “Three boys and two girls.” (Q: “And how did you arrange it?”) “Those boys were the ones we knew, who went to dancing lessons with us, we went on trips together. So we arranged that the boys would take a two-litre bottle of liquor, they said: ‘We need to fortify ourselves for the journey.’ Of course, we didn’t dint it much, but the boys... They took us a bit of the way, and then stop, the train doesn’t go any further. Onwards over the borders by foot.” (Q: “They didn’t check documents in those days?”) “They did.” (Q: “That must have been dangerous.”) “Maybe - the train ended there, but they had the advantage that I spoke perfect German, so when someone spoke to us, I answered in German. So we always scraped through somehow. And there was another train leaving from our side, and this time the conductors helped hide us, they watched out for us and when necessary we switched wagons - and in this way I reached Pacov.”

  • “We were on the main street, and then air raid and off went the sirens. So we rushed into the tallest building there was, because we reckoned: ‘They’ll blow up the top floors, the lower ones might survive.’ So we rushed inside and there was a bomb shelter there, but there was an antechamber in front of it. The shelter was already closed and we got into the antechamber. There were some nuns there and us two girls who had rushed in. Suddenly silence, we said: ‘Well hopefully it will be okay and nothing will happen.’ But on the contrary, the plaster started crumbling, I said: ‘Oh dear.’ The house got a hit from the side like this. Such a deathly calm, you couldn’t even imagine, maybe in some sealed chamber. So we were there, we couldn’t get out, we were buried under the rubble. They only said they found us, I don’t know how many hours it took them, but they got us out of there.”

  • (Q: “What did the food stamps contain, what could you get for them?”) “Not much. They gave us artificial honey, margarine, no butter, no lard either. Only the small children had a ration of butter. Twenty decagrammes of vegetables a week, some bread - I don’t know how much, but I know we had three thin slices a day to begin with, and even less afterwards. Do you know what we did during the war? We drove to the fields outside of Vienna, we gathered ears and ground the grain in a poppy-seed grinder, and then we made pancakes of a sort. The bread crumbled, because they said it contained chestnuts - it contained all sorts of things. Or fruit, when it was the time for wild cherries, then hurrah off outside Vienna to pick them. Those wild cherries, that was a lot of work, we preserved them so that we at least had some jam. Or plums, we went to pick plums and we made plum jam. There wasn’t anything to put on the bread, so we used everything we could find.”

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    Slatiňany, 03.10.2012

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It was incredibly silent under the rubble

Růžena Horáková survived the bombing of Vienna
Růžena Horáková survived the bombing of Vienna
photo: Martin Reichl

Růžena Horáková was born on the 12 of March 1924 in Radíč in the Sedlčany district. Her father was a coachman for the gentry, but he died when Růžena was four years old. Because her mother could not manage to look after both Růžena and her younger sister, Růžena was sent to her aunt in Vienna. There she attended a Czech primary school and a grammar school which was closed in 1938. After that, Růžena worked in a factory making batteries for military purposes. She spent almost the whole war in Vienna, she experienced many bombings - during one of them she hid herself in a house that was subsequently hit, burying her in the rubble. In February 1945 she and other Czechs fled from Vienna to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. She reached Pacov, where she worked at the local dairy before finding herself an administrative position at the Pelhřimov town council. After the war she got a job in administration in the state forestry in Slatiňany in the Chrudim district, where she remained until her retirement.