Jiřina Lukešová

* 1932

  • "It was terrible. The corpses were being taken away. There's a big stadium there. I don't know if it's still there. There were cars and bicycles driving on the sloping ground. They carried the dead to the stadium. People would come to see if they had any family there. Because across from where my aunt lived in town, a bomb fell and the whole house was destroyed, they went there to look too, because they didn't know where the people they knew were. Thank God they weren't dead. They took me with them. It was an ugly experience, the way things were lying dead on the ground, from old people to babies. By chance, the people I knew weren't there, somehow they got saved. It was an ugly experience. To this day, I still feel somehow strange when I think about it."

  • "Suddenly the sirens started blaring and the alarm was sounded. I grabbed my cousin's hand, 'Come on, let's go home.' But now the train dispatcher came to me and said, 'Where are you going?' They were friends. And he says, 'Nowhere! You're going to the shelter.' I said no, I'm not going. He grabbed my hand. And I was so angry with him, I bit his hand. That's when he let me go. I grabbed my cousin's hand and ran out of the station. We ran all the way. By then, planes were flying overhead, dropping bombs. I didn't know at the time what they were dropping them for. We were a far away from it. All we could hear was the explosions and the burning. We came to the village where my aunt was waiting for us. She was terrified because somehow they had also learned that the station had been bombed too. Then the air raid ended and one of my uncles, also a retired train dispatcher, went there to see. The station was really broken. He actually came to get me because there was an express train coming, but they didn't know what the station was like. So he took me and we went to look at the tank. It was terrible. The station was broken. And the dead bodies that were lying there! I also saw a train conductor rushing me to the shelter. His stomach was ripped open. It was a terrible experience."

  • "We climbed the heap like kids. One day my mom dressed me up, she was going to go to the park with me. I know I was wearing white štrample [tights] and some nice bright dresses. And my friends and I were going to rush to the heap. We took some paper, some big parchment [cardboard], and we climbed up and we went down. You can imagine what I looked like. I got a beating from my mother because instead of white things, everything was black. There wasn't much coal on the pile anymore. People who were socially disadvantaged would go there and collect coal."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Ostrava, 22.04.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:56:39
  • 2

    Ostrava, 25.04.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:22:59
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I’ll never forget the dead at Pardubice train station

Jiřina Lukešová, around 1950
Jiřina Lukešová, around 1950
photo: archive of Jiřina Lukešová

Jiřina Lukešová, née Kučerová, was born on 29 July 1932 in Ostrava-Přívoz. Her father worked on the railway as a train driver. Her grandfather knew T. G. Masaryk, with the mayor of Ostrava Jan Prokes and was a pre-war MP. During a visit to Pardubice to visit relatives, she witnessed the most devastating bombing of the city in August 1944. She also experienced bombing in Ostrava. She witnessed the end of the war in Ostrava-Privoz and the arrival of Soviet troops in April 1945. After February 1948, when the totalitarian rule of the Communist Party began, as a child from a non-communist Catholic family, she had difficult opportunities for study and employment. In 1951, she graduated from the pedagogical high school for kindergarten teachers. Until the beginning of normalisation in 1970, she taught at apprenticeships in Třinec and Ostrava. Then she worked in a kindergarten in Ostrava-Poruba. In 2024 she lived in Ostrava-Poruba.