“My great-grandfather Vincenc Ježek was a stonemason in Kuks. When he saw what great conditions they had there for old people, he applied for the right of domicile in Kuks. For himself and his descendants. So my father had the right of domicile in Kuks, and I had that right too. But the Germans came and took Kuks. And I had to apply to have my residency right transferred to Bohemia. So I lost my right of domicile in Kuks, but that doesn’t matter because the right of domicile doesn’t exist any more anyway.”
“So-called Halfjuden came [to Tvoršovice] for until the end of the war. We called them half-breeds [not a derogatory term in Czech - trans.]. Those were people who had a Jewish wife or a Jewish mother or grandmother, and they were from all kinds of professions, mostly these people ‘of the pen’ - intelligentsia - spoke German together. One Czech labourer shouted at them that they should be ashamed, that the Germans were torturing them and they toadied to them and spoke German together. We used to work with them on the fields, and there were very decent folk among them. In August 1944 one of them came to me and asked: ‘Where are the Russians?’ I said: ‘In Romania...’ That’s how we got on together.”
“There was a big prison camp in Tvoršovice. At first it was for petty criminals. Petty thieves and the like. They weren’t quite ripe for concentration camp. But they were guarded by Czech gendarmes, and I must say they were very harsh to them. I don’t know if all of them, but there certainly were ones like that. Because one incident happened that a prisoner stole a tin [of food] out of hunger. He got fifty lashes - I can still hear those lashes even today, because we had our windows facing in their direction.”
Věra Kalná, née Ježková, was born in 1929 and comes from tha family of a farm administrator. She grew up on several different estates in Central Bohemia, which were managed by her father. At the farm in Zaječice she met the Klingers, a Jewish family that suffered the same fate as many others - the mother and children were able to flee in time, but the father was deported to a concentration camp. Věra learnt to speak good German in Zaječice. Then her family moved to an estate in Tvoršovice near Neveklov - including the local manor house and a distillery. However, the region was seized by the German army and served as training grounds for the SS during the war. Most of the inhabitants had to move out, only some of the villages and farms were retained, though those were placed under forced administration by the SS. Věra’s father stayed in Tvoršovice on the request of the original owner. The family witnessed the turbulent end of the war here, the retreating German army, the arrival of Soviet forces and Czechoslovak tank brigades. Property was plundered and looted, until finally the original inhabitants were allowed to return, faced with the complicated process of post-war restoration. When the Communists came to power, they forced the old farmer families out again, and the subsequent collectivisation wrecked the farming estates, including Tvoršovice. Věra Kalná graduated in German and Russian from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and then taught these two languages for many years at her alma mater. In the 1960s the family moved to Říčany near Prague. Věra Kalná died in June 2023.
