Alena Tomsová

* 1937

  • "On August 20, my husband and I left for Yugoslavia. We spent the night in Bratislava on the twenty-first in the university dormitories, and there we heard about the trouble on the radio in the morning. We continued, because we didn't know what was going on, nothing, to the border crossing Medvedovo into Hungary, but it was already occupied by the Russians. There were some soldiers of theirs there and they were just sort of looking at us and we were talking to them in Russian, because we spoke Russian, we graduated from that. This one told us that he was from Dushanbe, and he hadn't seen his mom in two years, and he didn't know where they were or why they were here. So we wanted to talk to them, to continue to ask them and stuff, but their commander blinked and turned on us with a machine gun. Well, so we turned around and we were going to the bus, right."

  • "And there was a death march from Dolanky to Turnov, and I was in the backyard watching at the gate. And the prisoners just in those cloths, they were so tortured, they could hardly walk. If somebody stuttered, they were already being beaten with a rifle by the Germans. Well, we had gnocchi, potato pancakes, pancakes for lunch then. Now they went and my mother said: 'I'll take the plate, I'll throw it to them.' And now dad, he was just after the night shift, because he was at home, and he said: 'Don't you dare, Marie, you can't go there, because the Germans will come at you. Well, about six blocks down there was a bakery, Mr. Drahonovsky, and he threw two loaves of bread between the prisoners. So all he did then was slam the door and lock it, because the Germans would come right at him."

  • "We originally lived here next to the church and there was a beautiful park garden and there was a gazebo at the end. And we used to fly around in the garden and the gazebo didn't have any closed windows, there were some windows and we used to jump out of the windows with Bohouš and my sister was there too. And as we were jumping, suddenly it was so strange, so we said that we were jumping out of the window, so we got told off that you can't jump out of the window. But then the SS came and they found this mine. And we were jumping over the mine, so they just defused the mine, yeah. So it was still a remnant of the war here."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Rychnov u Jablonce nad Nisou, 17.05.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 51:07
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

To the puppet theatre in the camp

Alena Tomsová in 2021
Alena Tomsová in 2021
photo: Post Bellum

Alena Tomsová was born on 25 August 1937 in Rychnov nad Kněžnou, but grew up in Turnov. In 1945, a death march passed by their house, which Alena and her family watched. Alena’s father worked at the train station and after World War II he was transferred to the station in Rychnov near Jablonec nad Nisou, where the family moved. Alena joined Sokol and took part in the XIth All-Sokol Meeting in 1948. She graduated from business school and worked in the insurance industry all her life.