Bohumila Špůrková

“I remember one more experience, when partisans came to us. It was in 1943. Mom and dad were visiting the graves of their parents near Hranice in Moravia. And Heduška, my oldest sister, was taking [care of] the three of us because in Mořkov my sister Maruška was born. There were six of us, children. Well, we were at home and suddenly someone knocked. Heduška went to answer the door and there were two partisans with loaded guns and they said: ‘Do not be afraid, do not be afraid, just let us in.’ So, Heduška let them in, what else could she have done. They were Czechs, very skilful, university students, skilful boys. Unfortunately, their fate was harsh. We learned that in Frenštát some German woman or someone betrayed them and they shot themselves with their own guns. So, they did not survive the war. It was my kind of experience that I have get to know them, to see them. I was a little bit disobedient. I was waiting for my parents to come from the train, I was sitting on the window and they kept telling me: ‘Get down.’ And I kept saying: ‘No, I will go to meet my mom and dad.’ I remember it all. And they said: ‘Get down, quickly!’ But when I saw them [the parents] from a far I hopped down and ran to my parents and said: ‘Mom, dad, there are partisans in our home.’ You can imagine what it meant in the war. It was a horror. My mom and dad came home and partisans said them: ‘You cannot go and report us. Not until tomorrow morning.’ And my mom said: ‘Do not worry about us – me, my husband and daughter [Heduška]. But you heard it, the child. She will go to school tomorrow and she will say it there.’ So, they were thinking about it and at the end they said: ‘Well, you know what? You will go tomorrow morning to say that we were here, to report us.’”

“There were bombings. We had to go immediately to the cellar in the school. It was reported, they said: ‘Bombing’. So, we had to leave everything and chop-chop to the cellar. I remember I once went from the school and again these planes flew. I was walking down the road and was a perfect target. There was nothing around, a flat land all around. A postman walked against me and said: ‘Hurry up, hurry up, fall down in the ditch, quick, quick!’ And I, a stupid child, jumped to the ditch, the planes flew past me and the bombs fell on the hill that was near me. Maybe if I did not lie into the ditch, I would be a target. I do not know, a man does not know what could have happened. But the bomb did fell there. These are the war experiences. I remember it as a child.”

“My dad rode nicely in a livery because he was a coachman to the nobility. Chateau and everything were beautiful, the building was beautiful, so we lived a beautiful life there, almost as the nobility. It was a forest management, there was mister head forester and common greeting was ‘I kiss your hand’. I even remember that I kissed the hand of the wife of the head forester. That was a thing but it was already in Veřovice, I was bigger when I kissed her hand. And then 1938 came and we had to move to a hole where there was no electricity. There [in the chateau] was everything, lightings, just everything, in Jičín. And there [in a gamekeeper's lodge in Veřovice] was no electricity, no water, nothing. The windows were smashed, so my mum had to put blankets there so we would not freeze. So, it was something crazy. So, it struck us terribly, the mobilization [occupation of Sudetenland].”