“Back then, as they would attack the cemetery for the first time, we were in this chapel of sorts, the ceiling looked like one you would see in a chapel, and beneath it there was this small chapel. There were many of us. And back then this chapel got directly hit, this upper part, and there was nothing that could be set on fire. But all the graves, all around us, they were just charred. And as they would let us leave this chapel we saw everything was broken all around us. So it was the most difficult part I would say.”
“Back then our lager had been in ruins. Over there, where I had been living, there were windows facing each other, there was his entrance from the rear. And in the corner there was this bed where I had been sleeping, there were two beds on top of each other. And as we got there, the ceiling started to peel off in places, all those school desks had been pushed over, and the windows were just.... And next to this bed I had been sleeping, right beside the window, there was this dead woman, kinda pretty, she was from Poland. So we would take our suitcase and just run away, run away from all that.”
Blažena Kovaříková, née Matzalová, was born on 7 September, 1942 in the village of Veska near Rudolfov in the České Budějovice region. After training as a seamstress, she got a job as a governess at the Schacherl family in 1942. In February 1944 she was sent to a factory in Steyer, Austria, to perform forced labour. On her first day, she witnessed an Allied air raid during which both the city and the camp in which the witness had been living sustained heavy damage. Blažena and her colleagues had been transported to Schwechat in the southeastern suburbs of Vienna. There, in the cellars under the former brewery building, to which the Nazis had moved part of the manufacturing capacities, she had been working in quality control. Once again, she witnessed several bombing raids From December 1945 till the liberation she had been living in Police nad Metují as a totally deployed. In 1954 she married František Kovářík and moved to Lišov. She raised two children. The witness had been making her living as a seamstress, later she had been working at a vocational school. In 2020, Blažena Kovaříková had been living in Lišov near České Budějovice.
