Rajisa Kamlerová

* 1937

  • "We came to Šumperk, my uncle came with a wagon, a flat vehicle... yes, my mother was bringing a cow, because first of all to have milk on the road and then she didn't know how it would be here in the Czechia, it was reported that it was poor here too, so she had to take a cow to feed us."

  • "But then again I remember the war, how they enlisted, they all had to enlist. My grandmother stayed in Staviště alone, my aunt stayed in Novošulki alone, my mother stayed in Újezd [Újezdec] alone, so the women all gathered at my grandmother's and worked some of the fields, because there was a farm there. First of all, there was this - what was his name - Bohoušek, who fell - well, now it's slipped my mind - he has a memorial there - he fell at Dukla, he was about twenty years old. He was said to have enthusiastically said [that] he had to go and fight and avenge Milka and Josífek. Both of his uncles, Pepík and Rostík, were wounded, they were my mother's brothers, they saved themselves by being wounded somewhere and that they were just at that time like... But what Uncle Joseph said was terrible. Once, when they were reminiscing, he said he was driving a truck. All of a sudden he couldn't get it going, they got stuck, they were revving up, it wouldn't go, he got out of the truck, looked to see what was in front of him, and found out it was dead soldiers. He said he started vomiting and couldn't go any further, it was a horrible experience."

  • "I'll tell you how I witnessed the burning. Early in the morning a vehicle was driving - we lived in Újezdec, we called it Újezd - early in the morning I was awakened by a terrible rumble on the road - a vehicle, a Ukrainian was driving it and shouting: 'People, run, the Germans are coming at us!' Daddy's sister came running, dressed me, picked me up, told me to go... because Mum had just gone to the dairy with milk. She left my brother, who was three years old, to my mother. As people were running away, she threw me on some wagon, there were blankets, so she threw me in the blankets. I know we ended up in some wood where there were a lot of wagons, children. My mother, when she came home, she took my brother and they went to look for me. Somehow she found me there, and we went to my aunt's place in Novošulky, that was on the side of the front. In the afternoon people started shouting: 'There's a fire somewhere! Come and see!' We went up on this higher ground and we saw a terrible black smoke, they said: 'It's Malín on fire!' That's how I remember Malín burning. The next day, my mother left me with my aunt and went to Malín to look for her sister and nephew, and because they were all burned, she looked for a place to... She found them in the barn, the remains of clothes. One more story like that, later we found out that really in that barn there was also Josífek, he was about twelve years old, and when the barn started to burn, a girl of about eighteen and Josífek somehow got under the roof and jumped into the corn, the girl crawled on, while he started to choke and stood up. A German came up to him and stabbed him and threw him back into the fire. She, all burned up, saved herself - my aunt somehow talked to her afterwards - and told the story about Josífek."

  • Full recordings
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    Šumperk, 24.04.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:31:33
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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We saw black smoke, it was Malín burning...

Rajisa Kamlerová with her cousin, last day in Volhynia before leaving for Czechoslovakia, 1947
Rajisa Kamlerová with her cousin, last day in Volhynia before leaving for Czechoslovakia, 1947
photo: Witness´s archive - from her great nephew Jiří Gol

Rajisa Kamlerová, née Glancová, was born on August 19, 1937 in the village of Staviště in Volhynia, which became Polish after the end of the Polish-Soviet War in 1920. Her mother, Marie Glancová, was one of the descendants of Czechs who came to Volhynia in the late nineteenth century in search of cheaper land and a better living. Her great-grandfather Vojtěch Glanc became the first mayor of Malín. Her father Vladimir Kucharčuk came from the village of Újezdce. Her parents did not marry. Grandfather didn’t want to give his daughter to a Ukrainian. For about the first two years Rajisa lived with her mother in Staviště, then her father took them to his house in Ujezdce, where Rajisa and her younger brother Rostislav grew up. As a child she experienced the Soviet and German occupation, local war events in Volhynia. In 1940, the NKVD took her grandfather Boris Glanc away, and in a staged trial he was sentenced to eight years in a gulag in Siberia and never returned. Her father joined the resistance and was forced into hiding. They never knew what his further fate was, he was declared missing after the war. At the age of six, she watched from a nearby village the burning of Český Malín, burned by the Nazis, where her aunt and cousin died. In 1944, the uncles joined Svoboda’s army, with which they came to Czechoslovakia. They stayed there, settling in Hrabišín. Rajisa, her mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother moved to her grandmother’s house in Staviště after the enlistment of the male part of the family, from where they left for Czechoslovakia in 1947 as part of the repatriation agreement between the USSR and Czechoslovakia. They joined the family in Hrabišín. After finishing primary school, she joined Moravolen in Šumperk as a worker. In 1959 she married Jan Kamler, a medical student from Hrabišín. After their marriage they moved to Žulová, where her husband worked as a district doctor. In 1971 they moved to Šumperk. They brought up three children - Jan (1960), Roman (1963) and Ivana (1965). In 1970-1973 she studied at the secondary school of economics, most of her life she worked in the Pramet company in Šumperk in administrative positions, from where she retired in 1987. In 2024, at the time of recording, she was living in Šumperk.