Ludmila Kleinová

* 1935

  • "It was odd. Miss took us from school to the city hall to welcome the liberators. The whole class went. We came there, made a double row and the Russian elite passed there. Both generals and local political bigwigs went there. So we threw flowers at her, welcomed them and thanked them. And after a while, a man came and told us to go upstairs. He ushered us to a room where all the guests we had welcomed sat at a table. All of them were high-ranking officers and they wanted us to sing Czech songs to them. At first, we sang and then they seated us amongst themselves. General Yeremenko seated me in his lap. He has an interpreter behind him and then they started talking. They told me to pick a watch. The general pulled up his sleave and he had watches on his hand and told me to pick one. I said I did not want any. So he asked what I wanted. And there were sausages on the table and I felt like having some, such things had been scarce during the war. So I ate as many sausages as I could. And when I came home and told dad, he wrought his hands and said: 'My girl, you have foregone watches for sausages. Those watches had to be expensive!' Otherwise, I know that one Sýkora was buried at a corner in front of the city hall, we would bring flowers there."

  • "The houses stood in five rows and the life was happy and friendly there, as if in a village. Everyone knew each other. The women rarely went to work, it was the men who earned the livelihood as miners. Folks would sit on their porches, drink coffee and life was good. In the colony, people organised harvest festivals, May celebrations, there was a football field and the Sokol sports club playground and a puppet theatre. There were nice houses where the engineer lived. And I remember a house where the foremen lived. Those had nice two-room flats with bathrooms unlike us in the colony with shared outhouses."

  • "A Yugoslavian guy came, he brought us a basket of figs and started crying that there's a war back in our home. And we laughed and didn't belive him and he told us that we would find out that there is a war indeed. It was hard for them. They brought mil for our children and they would give us the shirts off their backs. The Yugoslavians sympathised with us, it surprised me a bit. They even let us exchange Czech money so that we could get back home."

  • "I saw damaged houses. One half stood there as usual and the other half, one could see furniture and everything. I don't remember which houses those were exactly, I was nearly out of my mind. When we got to the cemetery, there was a mass grave for the dead and they were throwing bodies in it."

  • “Dad used to tell me that on the 1st of May, there are parades and music plays. This would take place at the main square in Přívoz and it was a merry event. I had a friend named Věra Halfarová and she persuaded me to go and have a look. We walked all alone down the Nádražní Street to Přívoz – and nothing was going on there. But we saw people looting the shops.” “You mean they were stealing things?” “Yes, they were breaking the shop windows and stealing things. They thought nobody would find out. We were just watching it, one was taking some handkerchiefs, another one took other stuff. I was just shouting something at Věra in distress when the police came – and we ran as if for our lives. We were scared. We expected music and we saw looters instead.“

  • “It was terrible. At the time of the worst air raids in Ostrava, I had sore eyes and I was hospitalised in the ophthalmology ward in the Fifejdy hospital. And then, dad found out that a bomb fell in the hospital so he came and looked for me. Then he practically stole me from the hospital, he did not care what I was wearing or not. Simply, he wanted me at home so much and he took me away from there. He had a bike and we rode on that bike. Between the hospital and the cemetery, there was a sort of embankment and I and dad walked across. When we got closer to the cemetery, I saw how they carted the wounded. At that time, I think, there was the largest fire in Rütgers, that was a chemical plant in Mariánské Hory. They were transporting burned men from there. It was horrible. They, you know, cried, someone screamed in pain. And then we rode across Ostrava and I saw halfway torn down, gutted houses where I saw furniture and other household items. It was horrible. But that bomb in hospital did not go off.”

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    Ostrava, 13.12.2021

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He brought a basket of figs and started crying that there’s war in Czechoslovakia

Ludmila Kaděrová (Kleinová). 1952
Ludmila Kaděrová (Kleinová). 1952
photo: Archiv Ludmily Kleinové

Ludmila Kleinová, née Kaděrová, was born on the 19th of April in 1938 in the miners’ colony Na Františkové in Ostrava-Přívoz. Her father and other relatives worked in coal mines in and around Ostrava. During the German occupation, she witnessed parades of Nazi army corps and propaganda units in downtown Ostrava. In the later years of WWII, she would often hide in underground shelters during air raids. During the largest air raid of the Allies, on the 29th of August in 1944, she was in the Fifejdy hospital. After she survived the air raid, she witnessed transports of the wounded and then her father came on his bike to pick her. On the way home, she witnessed digging of a mass grave for unidentified air raid victims at the city cemetery. At the beginning of 1945, she saw looting of shops in Ostrava-Přívoz. Shortly after the liberation, a celebratory ceremony was held at the New City Hall in Moravská Ostrava where she sat on the knees of a high officer of the Red Army. Supposedly, the man was General Yeremenko. In December 1945, the family moved to the border-adjacent area where they spent several months living in the same house as its original German owners [who were to be expelled soon]. Shortly after her father died, the family moved back, this time to a miners’ colony Oderka in Ostrava-Přívoz. Here, she met her future husband, Ladislav Klein. Their union produced three children and in 1956, the family moved to Poruba, then still partly under construction. In August 1968, they were on holidays in Yugoslavia and after the invasion of Warsaw Pact armies to Czechoslovakia, they saw the support of local people for the occupied country. On their way back home, they spent a short time in a collection camp for Czechoslovaks who were both returning from abroad and leaving their occupied homeland. Ludmila Kleinová apprenticed as a gentlemen’s tailor and she spent all her working life in this profession. In 2021, she lived in Ostrava-Poruba.