Lucie Kohoutková

“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.”

“The war front went from Silesia, and the Germans were fleeing from there. They were passing by with their wagons and they even carried infants with them. They had no food for them, and when they brought them to the institute for infants, the babies were often already half-dead. They were leaving them there and the infants were dying one after another. Many babies have died there. Nobody knew anything about them. The families kept going and we did not know where they eventually ended. A child had only its name and that was all. One day after the war I was listening to the radio, and the Red Cross was searching for a child whom some parents had left in Radošov. I was asking myself: should I call them or should I not? It would be probably better for them not to know.”

“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.”