“The Germans found out that the airplane crashed somewhere in the Peruc forests and the German army thus searched them. And at that time, it was at the end of April 1945, my mother’s schoolmate was hiding the airmen who had been shot down, but he was afraid. There is a village in the Peruc forests which is called Chrastín. He was afraid that the Germans would find them there and that he would then be executed. And so he brought them to us, to my mom. My parents hid them in that mill race in which my dog Rafíček swam away from the mill wheel. My dad made a kind of scaffolding there, and he placed some planks over it. And they were in there during the day, for about two or three weeks, and at night they were taking turns and going to sleep in bed in the small cottage that we had there.”
“We saw that they led the Germans behind a wall when we came there to the wood behind the cemetery. They made them stand in a line and somebody was guarding them there. The dog that we were looking for belonged to one German who happened to be locked up in that shed, and the dog kept whining there in front of the shed all the time. They said that they had seen the dog by the cemetery and so we went there. There is also a Jewish cemetery next to it, and we climbed on the wall of the Jewish cemetery. And the Germans were standing there, there were about ten of them, I don’t know. And we were on the wall watching what would happen. And as we were there, suddenly an army car arrived there, and some soldiers got out and the Germans were lined up there and the Czech men were in front of them and suddenly there was a ‘poof-poof’ sound and the Germans dropped down.”
“I did not take my final examination, because the teacher stopped me; I remember that it happened by the window in the school hallway. She told me that I was from a capitalist family and that I should not think that she would let me pass my final exam. I thought, oh well, I won’t pass the final exam, so what? But then she said that I would go to work on the construction of a railway line in Ostrava. There were people, who were not agreeable [to the communists], and who were thus picked to go to work on the ‘Youth Construction’ in northern Moravia. I didn’t want to go there at all. I was already dating my husband at that time, and so I went to see him and we agreed that we would have a baby, and I did not take my final school-leaving exam.”
Ladislava Loučková was born on June 3, 1934 in Prague in the miller’s family of Mr. and Mrs. Štěpánek. During the period of World War Two she met airmen who had been shot down and for whom her parents provided a hiding place in the mill in Zlonice. In May 1945 she witnessed an execution of German prisoners of war by Czech soldiers. During the liberation by the Red Army she and her mother had to hide from drunken Soviet soldiers. After 1948 her parents’ mill became expropriated by the state and she witnessed the devastation of the mill’s equipment. During her studies at a grammar school in Prague, a communist teacher did not allow her to sit for the final examination due to Ladislava’s alleged bourgeois origin. In 1952 she married officer Radko Loučka and they had three children. Ladislava worked in various non-skilled jobs - on a poultry farm, as a petrol station attendant and in a medicine supplies depot. Her last position before retirement in 1988 was in the District Cultural Centre in Kladno where she worked as a conferencier. At present she lives with her family in Prague 13 - Lužiny.
