“When they locked Mum up in Bratislava, the strangers that we were staying at took us to the Red Cross, and they sent us to children’s homes. They sent me to Žilina to the bigger children and my brother to Turčianský Svatý Martin to the children up to three years of age. So we were separated. I was with the older children up to the age of thirteen fourteen years. We were looked after by nuns. I remember they weren’t very nice. They had a lot of us. There wasn’t any food to cook from, they didn’t have it easy. But I remember that they also beat us. Me too, when I weed myself. I remember how the nun beat me. It wasn’t very nice there I guess.”
“Back then in Kněhyně they were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the Germans, and Dad managed to lead the whole staff out of the siege. You could say that a number of partisans survived that day thanks to him. Not just the staff, but the partisans too, he managed to lead them out of that bitter siege. Then they split up and they didn’t function as one partisan brigade, but as separate detachments. Dad went back to the bunker with one other partisan to collect the medicine and ammunition, and the bunker was hit by a shell. Both of them were heavily injured. They tortured the other one to death on the spot, and they took Dad with a spinal injury first to Ostrava and then to Kounice Student Hall in Brno. And how do we know all this. Not even the partisans themselves knew this. They thought he had stayed there, that he’d died there. Dad was held prisoner at Kounice Student Hall in Brno, and there was some constable by the name of Badal [Jan Badal - ed.] from Moravský Beroun locked up in the neighbouring cell. They sent messages to each other in Morse code, and they scraped out a hole in the wall so they could hear each other. So they passed on all information to each other, so that if either of them survived, they could tell the others family what had actually happened to them. Constable Badal survived, and then a long time after the war he found my mum in Jeseník, and it wasn’t until then that he told her how it had all happened back then.”
“When she found him, the headmistress of the children’s home had planned to adopt him. So he was quite well off there. The headmistress thought no one would own up to him any more because it was already half a year after the war. So she was already in the process of adopting him. They also called him differently. They called him Jurášek instead of Jiříček because they weren’t able to pronounce the ‘ř’ very well. And perhaps he didn’t pronounce it well either, as a little child, so they called him like differently. Mum had difficulty finding him, just according to his looks. When she brought him to the destitute flat in Přerov, he cried terribly: ‘I want to go home.’ He kept wanting to go home. He wasn’t home there any more. He had gotten used to the other place because he was still really very little.”
“She found me in Žilina. She took me to Přerov, and begged some people we didn’t even know, if I could stay with them. Our flat in Želatovice was taken after the war because they thought we weren’t alive. All our things were gone, so I don’t even have any photographs, no small keepsake from my childhood. In Přerov they gave Mum a spare flat in the yard. It was terrible, damp. At night the walls were black with cockroaches, she left me with the owners of the building. They were butchers and they looked after me there for a while. She set off to look for my brother. But she had to go repeatedly. It took her half a year to find him.”
Drahomíra Hudečková was born on 4 June 1940 in the village of Tučín, to her unmarried parents Josefa Slaboňová and Sláva Josef Koza. During the war her father was active in the Přerov resistance group Rudá slovanská internacionála (Red Slavic International), and he organised financial aid for the families of arrested resistance fighters. In summer 1944 he fled to Slovakia to escape arrest, there he joined the Slovak National Uprising against the occupying Germans. Later, her father headed the intelligence section of the 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka in Moravia. On 3 November 1944 the heavily injured Sláva Koza was caught in the main partisan bunker near Čertův mlýn (Devil’s Mill) Mountain, and on 15 January 1945 he was executed at Kounice Student Hall in Brno. After her father left them, her mother took the four-year-old Drahomíra and her two-year-old son Jiřík to Slovakia. However, in October 1944 her mother was arrested and the children were placed in different children’s homes via the Red Cross. Drahomíra Hudečková thus spent the last months of the war in a children’s home in Žilina. Her mother found her there two months after the war, and she was not able to find her three-year-old son Jiřík until after six months of intense searching. In 1945 doctors diagnosed five-year-old Drahomíra with tuberculosis, and so her mother moved with both her children to the mountain town of Jeseník, where the witness cured herself at the local spa. After her studies Drahomíra Hudečková worked as a teacher until her retirement. She now lives in Lipník nad Bečvou.
