“Everyone took their dead. We have a cottage in Rouchovany so in a few days, we – we did not move there because we were renting it but they took our father to Rouchovany. There, we buried and then it all… We then moved to Rouchovany and the situation calmed down a bit, obviously. But it was all sort of chaotic and it was so sad...”
“I remember how, on that 8th of May, the front was passing, they were going to Prague, and in Hrotovice, it was said that a gunman was stationed at the edge of Hrotovice, there is a crossroad, and allegedly, he had been shot dead, which meant that he couldn’t give a sign to those pilots with the bombs. And when the front came, everything happened so quickly, I guess, they were pretty fast because during the night, nothing, and then, it was nine or ten in the morning when the planes flew by and dropped the bomb. People were standing there welcoming the aermy and those who had been in the resistance somehow organised it so he [our father] was there as well and he perished on that square. Then we went to look for them, for our father, and that’s what I remember, there is such a little park and there those hundred and twenty people were laid down. And that’s how we found him.”
„It was close to the nearby castle when that happen, that tragedy. We were at home, dad was away. Just after the bomb fell, I don’t actually remember whether someone came to tell us that dad had died there. Then I and mom went to search for him. But we had been at home. And it was close to that castle when it happened. Of those Russian soldiers, many died there as well. As soon as the situation calmed down, they went on towards Prague.”
Miroslava Knížátková, née Sekvencová, was born on the 2nd of June in 1939 in Rouchovany in the Třebíč area. During the war years, she lived in Hrotovice where her father Oldřich worked as a road maintenance worker and her mother Hedvika was a homemaker. On the 8th May of 1945, the village became a place of the so-called Hrotovice Tragedy; due to miscommunication, the Red Army initiated an air raid on the centre of Hrotovice. The tragedy claimed 150 lives, including Miroslava’s father, Oldřich Sekvenc, member of the resistance group Movement for Freedom. After the war, she, her mother and her sister moved to Rouchovany where she attended school and the sports’ club Sokol. Between 1953 and 1957, she studied at the Higher Business Academy in Znojmo and then she worked in the Moravský Krumlov forestry management company. Here, she met her husband, former resistance fighter, Milan Knížátko, the wedding took place in 1963 and two years later, they moved to Němčice. During the 1970‘s, Miroslava changed jobs several times. At first, she got a job in the Retex textile factory, a year later, she started to work at t eht own council in Ivančice and from 1977 until she retired in 1994, she worked in the Dukovany nuclear plant. In 1990, she and her husband moved to Budkovice where she lived at the time of recording in 2021.
