We lived in a chapel and slept on a bier
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Žofie Sýkorová, née Vlčková, was born on 26 July, 1930. She grew up in Javoříčko in Litovel region. Her father, originally a butcher, was a war invalid and died during her early childhood. Eleven children were left behind and seven of them underage, who the mother tried to look after working for the local farmer. The family lived in a municipal house and suffered from a big poverty. It was not unusual, that the girl fainted from hunger at school. In winter and spring 1945 the village of Javoříčko was the base of a partisan group Jermak-Fursenko. To punish the village for supporting partisans it was burned out on 5 May, 1945 by German state police commando and all present men were also shot; altogether it was 38 males. The brothers of a witness survived the massacre, older ones were on forced labour in Essen. Her brother Alois saved his life by lying amongst the shot ones and pretending to be dead. The Vlčeks became homeless and lived in a small chapel, which the Germans didn’t destroy, for a whole month. Then they moved to Nemilany near Olomouc, where, same as the other survivors, they got a small house. Because they did not enter the communist party, they lost it again after 1948. The witness worked as a worker in the Zora factory, and later as a shop assistant. She married at the age of seventeen and stayed with her husband for sixty-one years and together they raised three daughters.
