Lucie Kohoutková

“The other mom had a child during the war. She suffered from tuberculosis since her youth, and since Hitler cared for this, the child could not stay at home. She was not even allowed to breastfeed, and so they took the baby away and placed it in the institute for infants. This institute was located in Kysíbl-Radošov, about half an hour from Karlovy Vary. It was run by the sisters of the Congregation of the Holy Cross and it was a very progressive institution for that time. They already used glass boxes and they had the wards divided into a ward for children three months to six months old, another for toddlers up to two years, and down on the ground floor they had older children, boys and girls from two to six years. It was thus an infants’ institute, but for children up to six years. We were going there to see the little boy. But he died of diphtheria. His mother then had a second child, and that baby was placed there as well. This boy’s brother is still alive. He was in the institute until the end of the war and only then were they allowed to take him home when the regulation was annulled. German children were deported and they brought Korean children there instead.”

“Then I came back to Cheb and I hoped to finally complete my studies, but they closed down the school. The communists came there and it was over with the school, with the convent and everything. It was simply the end and the convent closed down on September 14, 1950. We were only candidates and we had not professed our vows yet. There were three of us and then there were Czech nuns. On September 15th, a bus arrived and they ordered us to get on and announced that those of us who were Czech nationals would be taken to the provincial home in Kroměříž. The other nuns were German. When this happened the mother superior was in Prague where she was negotiating the deportation of the German sisters. They left the German nuns there, because they could not be interned. We thought that we were going to Moravia; but nobody knew anything. They brought us to Bohosudov to the Jesuit monastery. They must have transported the monks away the previous night, because when we came there, there were still cups on the table.”

“The sisters secretly accepted those of us, who have not yet taken our vows, into the novitiate. The comrades learnt about it immediately, however. They told us that we were free to go home, and when we did not want to go, they made us get into cars and they took us to various hospitals. Five of us went to Kladno, others to Pilsen, Rakovník and to Ústí nad Labem. They assigned each of us to a different hospital ward, among the civilian nurses. We were not allowed to leave Kladno nor wear our nuns’ habits. We could only wear them when we went to church. When we went to work, we wore civilian clothing. But we did keep our crosses; we did not give up on that. There were five of us in the hospital in Kladno, plus two other sisters from a different congregation. We lived in the basement at first, and then in the attic. They were moving us from one place to another. Among the nuns in Kladno I was the first one to go back to civilian life, because my mom was ill. We were not in the world, and we were not in the convent, either; it was like something in between. We did not have the nice things that come with living in a convent, but they only let us keep our obligations. It was a situation when we were neither here nor there.”