Maria Sokolová

* 1932

  • "When the house had to be darkened, the guards would come, they would guard it, and that was the fines. And they shot one gentleman there. There was martial law, you weren't allowed to go out from ten or whatever time. And he used to go to the pub, he was the manager of the quarry. And I saw him lying there dead. He'd go to the pub to talk to the men and he'd been in agreement with the men who were guarding the place. They had a password. So he always went in and out of the pub. But then they changed the guard and he left the pub and they shot him. After 9 or 10 o'clock, that was martial law. So he lay there for two or three days, I went to see. I thought I'd go that way and there was a soldier standing on one side of the road, on the other side of the road, and we had to go around it, so you weren't even allowed to go around that way. He was covered there."

  • "As children we were terribly afraid of the Germans. We were in the pastures and a German came to us. We used to sit by the well, because there we could always drink at the well when we were thirsty. And so we sat by the well and talked like kids. And suddenly a German came to us and we got quiet and we were afraid of what he would do to us. And he had a cup and he took out a snifter and he took water from the well and he put the snifter in it for us. And he wanted us to drink. And we said, "He wants to poison us. We didn't take any of it from him. He drank first, he probably knew we were scared, and we still didn't take it from him."

  • "There from our village the Jews were popular. They had children, they went to school with us. Nobody had anything against them, and suddenly people felt sorry for them. Some people were terribly mean. One Jewish boy hid and one guy dug him out and beat him up some more. And then the Germans just took him away. But longer, like the second or third day. And he came back after the war and he said, 'I could have taken it from him away, but I'm not that bad.' And he was the only one who saved himself from the war."

  • "Then came the blackout, it had to be blacked out. I remember when we came in from the field, we drove the cattle in, and it was full of Germans, full of German soldiers. And they opened houses and they were everywhere, they didn't ask anybody. And there weren't any factories there with us, so that maybe the horn would go off when a plane was flying or something. I'm talking towards the end of the war almost, 1943/1944. That's when there was a plane flying, and we'd pack up our things and run somewhere. Even at night. And one night we're running into an orchard and suddenly a German soldier with a rifle. And back, zurück, zurück, back. And we showed him the plane and he said, 'That's ours, that's ours.' So we went back. And we were already dressed and sleeping."

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    Žďár nad Metují, 05.03.2019

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    duration: 01:02:44
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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I don’t even think about Slovakia anymore

Maria Sokolova
Maria Sokolova
photo: Archive of the witness

Maria Sokolová was born on 13 June 1932 in Ladomirov, Slovakia. She grew up in a peasant family in poor circumstances. As a child, she experienced the war events in eastern Slovakia, recalling her coexistence with German soldiers, the destruction of the local Jewish community and the liberation by the Red Army. After her father died during the war, her sister got married in Bohemia and the family followed her. They settled first in Broumov and later in Teplice nad Metují. She worked as a laborer all her life. In 2019, she lived in Hejtmánkovice in the Hradec Královehradec region.