The soldier who raped me wanted to take me to Russia, so I escaped
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Gertruda Turnová was born on 27 December 1928 in Wittichenau, Saxony, into a family of a Pole and a Lusatian Serb, the elder of two daughters. Her father Johann died during the Second World War. Mother Agnes worked for a farmer on a farm and had to turn around to support herself and her children. Towards the end of the war, the mother and the witness, who was fifteen years old, were raped by Soviet soldiers. My mother became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Helga, and later remarried and her second husband adopted all of her daughters. Gertrude fled to Czechoslovakia for fear of the soldier who raped her and wanted to take her with him to the Soviet Union. There she met her husband František in the village of Království and in 1948 their first daughter Eva was born. They married five years later. The witness did not obtain Czechoslovak citizenship until 1963. She and her husband raised six children together, three daughters and three sons. She worked in agriculture and her husband was the manager of several state farms. He also managed a farm in the now defunct village of Fukov in the Šluknov foothills. In 1974, Gertruda Turnová found employment at the Bytex national enterprise in Jiříkov, where she remained for six years after her retirement. In 2024 she was living in Jiříkov in the Děčín region. We were able to record the story of the witness thanks to financial support from the municipality of Jiříkov.
