Ludgarda Plačková

* 1929

  • "The Russians were given vodka and all of them got drunk. At our place it was calm because the officers were accommodated there. But the others went to the houses below us and there they rioted. They raped girls and killed Hilda. She was my age. They were drunk, started shooting around and hit the girl in the head."

  • “The store owner Karel Vitásek was accused of selling goods to the Germans at wartime. But it was a completely logical thing that when they came to the store he sold it to them. What else could he do? So they brought Vitásek to the post office and there they tortured him. The hanged him upside down and tore off nails from his feet. These were policemen and some locals from Hať.”

  • “Karlík’s veins around his heart were clogged with sand. My mum saw it at the roentgen picture. It was fine sand from the Sahara desert. They said they could operate him only a year later. But Karlík didn’t make it that far. Several sand grains got loose, went into his heart and he sustained a heart attack. Our Karlíček had died. That was a blow. We thought we’d all die. Such a young boy. I witnessed him dying in my mum’s arms. Our father was working at the field. I ran to fetch him but he didn’t make it in time. He came running to the yard, chased the horses to the stable and rushed after Karlík. But Karlík was dead already, he wasn’t with us anymore. So we lost a boy. The damned Africa was to blame.”

  • “In the prison there was a bishop from Nitra who also worked as a male nurse. He used to go to our dad, pray with him and encouraged him to hold up. ‘You have to want to return home. You have to want to live. You mustn’t give up,’ he told dad. In the evening he used to go to the cellar where sauerkraut was stored and brought dad the liquid so that he could drink it. Because my father had fever. This way our dad survived three years - on sauerkraut water and prayers.”

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    Hlučín, 10.04.2016

    (audio)
    duration: 03:37:16
    media recorded in project Silesia: Memory of multiethnic Region
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The most important thing in life is home. My home is where I was born and I like all of it there.

Ludgarda Plačková, 1937
Ludgarda Plačková, 1937
photo: archiv Ludgardy Plačkové

Ludgarda Plačková was born in 1929 as the youngest of four children to a farmer’s family in Hať in the Hlučín region. Her parents worked the land and bred cattle. In the late 1930s Ludgarda witnessed the construction of Czechoslovak borderline fortification with her brothers taking part in it. In September 1938 she saw Czechoslovak mobilization and the subsequent arrival of the German army to the Hlučín region. Along with all the other local inhabitants she was awarded German citizenship and began attending German school. All three of her brothers were drafted to the Wehrmacht. Alois, the youngest one, fell in 1943 in Belarus, the middle one Karel died as a consequence of an illness contracted at wartime three years after its end. In April 1945 Ludgarda Plačková witnessed heavy fighting during the Ostrava-Opava operation as well as the violent behavior of the Soviet soldiers towards civilians. Following liberation she wasn’t allowed to carry on with her grammar school studies and witnessed the persecution of some of the local people. In 1953 her father was sentenced for refusing to join a collective farm; her mother was deported to a state farm in central Bohemia. Up until retirement in 1985 Ludgarda Plačková worked as a cattle nurse.