We weren’t afraid as children, the fear of war didn’t hit me until I was an adult.
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Růžena Saulová, née Grajcarová, was born on 25 May 1931 in Všetiny near Holešov. Her father František Grajcar fought in World War I on the Italian front and as a Sokol member defended the borders of the newly established Czechoslovakia against the Hungarian Republic of the Councils in 1919. After the war, he worked as a driver in a brewery and enlisted again during the mobilization in 1938. After the outbreak of the war in 1939, he had to drive a wagon for the German army in the territory of Poland for several months. Mum Anna ran a convenience store. Růžena finished the municipal school in Všetaty and the burgher school in Holešov, after the war she took a one-year apprenticeship course at the burgher school. She remembers the bombing of Ostrava, Zlín and the liberation of Holešov by the Red Army. She graduated from a business academy so that she could run the family shop, but the communists confiscated it after 1948. She married in 1950 and has three children. She lived in Opava, Prague and Brno and worked in various companies as an accountant or administrative worker. In 1988, as a widow, she married for the second time Eduard Saul, who served as Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to Beijing from 1988 to 1990, and the witness lived with him there. In 2019 she lived in Brno.
