Anežka Suchánková

* 1933

  • ,,For example, in that house, when the war was coming to an end, they said it would be over somehow, so my parents had a room there, and there was a big stone. And there was a hiding place, it used to be a cellar. And they just put there - in those days they wore these striped scarves, velvet scarves, they put there some gold that they had, they didn't have much, but who knows what kind of things that seemed more valuable, so they put it there and all that. Well, and they even put it, those things that were valuable, in a tin jug, like what they used to put milk in. And when they got there, it was all... they pulled out the jug, it wasn't ruined quite a lot. And when they pulled it out, it all crumbled to dust because they were throwing those armored fists in there."

  • "Mom, she couldn't think of anything else to take, like money or something. Not at all. She just took the boy and we went. In casual clothes, casual shoes. So we waited there until the shooting stopped, and we didn't know what was going on, but it was quiet. So then we took the dirt road to Veselíčko. The soldiers left. They had to leave because we were, as the shooting was going on, hiding in the trench. I don't even know how they left, I didn't see which way they went. Well, they didn't leave through Střemeníčko, so they had to go to Luka, because there was only a field road to Bouzov, it was a forest road, it wasn't a road."

  • ,,Well, my mother took my brother, the youngest one, he was three years old, and we all went out. The soldiers were already there, and they drove us to Stremeníčko. When the shooting started, we had to hide in a ditch somewhere. When we were under the tree, the shooting stopped. But then we could see the smoke coming out every time. Shots and smoke. We could see that Javoříčko was on fire. We didn't know what else was going on there, we didn't find out until after everything." -"And were you led by the Germans or did you run away by yourselves? "There were some Germans with machine guns in the street. They started pointing that maybe they would shoot in the air, but we just ran off on our own, into that Stremeníčko. It was the best thing for us, because we had to take that turn to get to Veselíčko. So we all ran to that St... well, a big crowd of us was running, not all of us, a lot of us.

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    Olomouc, 03.09.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 02:05:20
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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I felt like a refugee

Anežka Suchánková (cutout from a family photograph), circa 1950s
Anežka Suchánková (cutout from a family photograph), circa 1950s
photo: archive of a witness

Anežka Suchánková, née Zapletalová, was born on 29 May 1933 in Javoříčko, Litovel region. Her peaceful childhood in a small settlement was disturbed by the Second World War, especially its end, when she witnessed the tragic event of the burning of Javoříčko. She was twelve years old when Javoříčko was burnt down on 5 May 1945 by the SS commando of Lieutenant Egon Lüdemann. Together with other women and children, she was allowed to escape from the village into the forest to escape the destruction, but from where she hid she saw and heard everything - fire, shooting, screaming and crying, which is indelibly etched in her memory. Coincidentally, her father, Karel Zapletal, also survived the event. However, their family home was destroyed, so they moved to Nemilany near Olomouc, where they lived in the house of the displaced Germans. After the war she changed several jobs. In the 1950s she faced a series of interrogations by State Security because of a mocking poem about Klement Gottwald that was circulating in her work. However, no significant sanctions awaited her. During her lifetime, she worked in a factory and in a hospital. In 2020 she lived in Nemilany in Olomouc.