She found the love of her life on forced labour deployment
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Hana Krejčová, née Radenko, was born in the community of Dolynka in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on 18 April 1923. Her mother came from the area and her father’s family reportedly fled there from the Ural area during the Bolshevik revolution. When her native region was occupied by the Nazi army, Hana was deployed on forced labour at age 19 and left her native Ukraine, never to return permanently again. She was separated from her family and put on a train to Halle in Germany, more than 2,000 kilometres away from home. She experienced hunger and humiliation, brutal treatment in a Soviet POW camp, hard work and countless air raids of ally bombers. But she also found the love of her life, Josef Krejčí, who helped her to make it to Czechoslovakia in April 1945. She succeeded avoiding deportation to the USSR several times and married Josef Krejčí in 1945. She says they were together for fifty-seven years full of love and her husband’s death in 2002 was the most difficult moment in her life. The witness lived in Králíky in 2018.
