Jiřina Kroutilová

* 1937

  • "And before the war was over, they came to us - in Siberia, in Russia, there was terrible hunger. There was just - there people had nothing to eat, the Russian army was fighting I don't know where in the west, and people were going to Volhynia to beg bread, yeah. I remember that, they came to the kitchen and they said, 'Paže podaritě kusok chleba.' Terrible, that's absolutely heartbreaking. And you couldn't give them any more, just that piece of bread, because in a while we wouldn't have anything to eat ourselves. And when we - they could sleep in these families too - so we would go to the bedroom in the evening, and in the kitchen we would bring a batch of straw, and the straw would be spread out on the floor, and that's where the beggars who had come from that deep Russia to beg slept, and they had a bag of bread, which they - they got a piece of bread everywhere - and they dried it on the stove in the families where they spent the night, so that it wouldn't rot, and then they were taking it home to Russia, thousands of miles away, a dry rucksack - you know what the Russian people suffered, nobody can imagine. And then they went home with a rucksack full of dry bread so that their children wouldn't starve to death."

  • "There was no shooting in our village, I know that there was one village nearby, called Český Malín, which just - someone, someone shot there, whether it was some Bandera group member or someone, when it was occupied by the Germans, and then they burned the whole village down, I remember that."

  • "When the Second World War broke out, all those Czech men volunteered to join the Czech army, they wanted to go to liberate the republic because they had had enough, they wanted to get out of there because there... - so they were already setting up cooperative farms there, Ukraine was already under Russia."

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    Šumperk, 29.05.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 01:51:39
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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When we crossed the border, we found ourselves in a completely different world

1989. From left: Barbara Kroutilová (daughter), Jiřina Kroutilová, Karel Linha (father). On the farm in Temenice.
1989. From left: Barbara Kroutilová (daughter), Jiřina Kroutilová, Karel Linha (father). On the farm in Temenice.
photo: Witness´s archive

Jiřina Kroutilová, née Linhová, was born on 12 October 1937 in the village of Krupá Hranice in Volhynia, in what was then Poland, now western Ukraine. She comes from the large community of Volhynian Czechs there. Her father’s name was Karel Linha, her mother Emilie, née Hradecká. She had a sister Antonia, later married Divišová. The family moved to Czechoslovakia in 1947 as part of the post-war repatriation of Volhynian Czechs and settled in Temenice near Šumperk. Her mother died in 1956 of tuberculosis. She worked as a nurse all her life. In the 1960s she lived in Prague, and in 1967 she had the opportunity to travel to Canada to visit relatives. After the August 1968 occupation, she and her future husband František Kroutil settled in Switzerland, where she was living at the time of the interview (2019).