Eva Rybová

* 1931

  • "It was invented by my friends from Liberec, masters of the sport, who my husband started climbing with them in 1955, and Karel Cerman was in Lomnice. We built a hut, so they all met at our hut. Then three years later they built their own huts, and a resort was created under Hruba Skala. They told my husband that if he wanted to climb rocks, they would take him to the Tatras. I thought it was nonsense how they could take a blind man to the Tatras. They were going to take care of him. He actually went with them, there were about ten of them. They took him to the Tatras, they took him to VYsoká, but in winter, when the rocks are sunken. They took him up and he walked like a blind man. They were a bunch of efficient climbers, masters of the sport, they said they would take care of him. I warned them that it wasn't easy, someone had to be with him all the time and tell him. They made it, they arrived safe and sound, and I guess it suited them. The group grew stronger like that and they told him: 'If you've mastered Vysoká, you can climb the rocks here too - we'll take you to Taktovka.' Some holidaymaker from Hrubá Skála found out about it, she was a Prague girl or maybe from Ostrava, she wrote an article about her husband in the newspaper, which Honza Špáta came across. We didn't know him then, we didn't know of any documentary filmmaker at all. He wrote to us that he was coming to visit us and that he would be interested in making a film about my husband."

  • "Life in our family changed a lot after February 1948 because the communists closed our shop and my father's business because he was an exploiter for them. He had no employees in his life, he had four children, he was renting, he didn't have his own workshop or shop, everything was borrowed. He had to leave the shop, and it destroyed our mother psychologically. Mainly because my dad came from a downright communist working class family - he was one of seven children, his dad was a horse wagon driver and mom worked in the fields - that they treated him like that. All those boys worked their way up and learned. And when they finally managed to own their own shop and the children were grown up, well they weren't, they were five years old, the communists took it away. She couldn't put up with it, so life with us consisted of my mother constantly cursing the communists, we heard that all the time."

  • "The refugees were moving with the cars, going from Rváčov to the square and then on to Nová Ves and Nová Paka, etc. Allegedly, someone from one of the cars was supposed to shoot at people on the sidewalks. It was on Smetana Street, they were going to Rváčov to the city. We were there too. Suddenly someone shouted: 'Everybody take cover!' We hid behind piles of cinder that were lying by the road, and [Lieutenant] Kozlov drove up in his car and started shooting at the people who were riding in the cars. Supposedly because someone shot at the people on the sidewalk." "And you personally did not hear any shots from the car before that?" "No, it must have happened somewhere higher up. We were standing on the corner of what is now the Babylon pub, because we were walking to Kalcovka, and this must have happened higher up by the park in Smetana Street. Allegedly someone shot there, I don't know. But I saw Kozlov take an automatic and shoot the whole street, both towards the square and upwards. We saw that."

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    Liberec, 27.09.2023

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Her father’s business was taken away by the communists, then her illness took her husband and son

Eva Rybová in a Podkrkonoše costume, 1946
Eva Rybová in a Podkrkonoše costume, 1946
photo: Archive of the witness

Eva Rybová, nee. Sahánková, was born on April 6, 1931 in Lomnica nad Popelkou. At the end of the Second World War, she experienced the massacre of German civilians in Smetana Street. Her father, a tradesman, had his butcher’s shop taken away by the communists in 1948 and the family was considered exploiters. The witness worked all her life as a governess. In 1951 she married her first husband Josef Kuhn. Despite vision problems and subsequent blindness, he took up mountaineering and skiing, and promoted sports for the blind. The couple participated together in skiing championship races for the blind in Western European countries. The director Jan Špáta made a documentary about them called Does the Sun Shine? Josef Kuhn died in 1978, and the witness also lost her son to prolonged cancer. She later remarried, marrying glassmaker Jiří Ryba. In 2023 she lived in Lomnica nad Popelkou. We were able to record her story thanks to the financial support of the town of Lomnice nad Popelkou.