Eva Učíková

* 1932

  • "I had my suitcase ready by the bed, and in the garden - [Daddy] had a sister and her husband dug a hole in the garden, I told you last time - they made three steps and put a footbridge there. A metal sheet on top, grass and roots on top of that, so that it wouldn't be visible in the daytime. And so when they started to announce, 'Achtung, achtung, wir gegen die Luftrage Meldung' - I still remember that, but where I put the wedding picture, I don't know - so as my parents had [night duty], my mother had to go to Zbrojovka and my father had night duty at the post office, so they were both gone. When the siren started going off, I had to take a torch in one hand and my suitcase in the other, in Brno the lights were out everywhere, we lived on the first floor, so I went. I was always scared because I always went first. I had my coat and shoes ready by my suitcase. My grandfather and grandmother didn't go there anymore. They said if it fell, they'd die at home. So they didn't go into the shelter, into the hole we had there."

  • "My parents were friends with a family - they were dentists and Jews, both of them. They had to wear JUDE on their lapels. One day he came to us - I told you this last time - he brought this box full of gold, saying that they would surely take it to one of those camps if we wouldn't take the gold and give it to them. Dad said, 'Well, but we have a girl, you're without children, we have to take more things, and I'd still be worried about losing that box of gold somewhere'. So then he gave it to some other man who built a villa with it after the war."

  • "I was in Žabovřesky and they reported that Zbrojovka was the hardest hit. I was at my grandmother's, she was just going somewhere. I took my coat and shoes and I ran from Žabovřesky past the Kounice tracks, where I was always afraid, because from there you could always [hear] screaming, they were abusing people. There were abused people there who wanted something that they didn't want to reveal. So I went past the Kounice tracks through Cejl and ran to those Husovice. When I got to Husovice, my mother rolled her eyes at me and I said, 'God thank you for being home, I was afraid that you were there and that something might have happened to you'."

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    Šternberk, 12.06.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 01:57:13
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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I still get goosebumps when I hear sirens

Eva and Karel Ucik, wedding photograph, 1951
Eva and Karel Ucik, wedding photograph, 1951
photo: archive of the witness

Eva Učíková, nee. Krčmová, born on 11 July 1932 in Brno as the only child of Oldřich Krčma and Marie, nee. Ševčíková. Her mother graduated from a school for women’s professions, she was one of seven children, her parents had a restaurant in Žabovřesky in Brno. Father lived with his parents in Brno, Husovice, where grandfather bought a house. He worked at the post office in the Alfa arcade on today’s Poštovská Street in Brno. During the bombing of the city in 1945 he was buried there and imprisoned for three days. Eva Učíková grew up in the middle of the war. At the age of seven, she had to go alone to the garden shelter at night, her mother was forced to work and both parents worked night shifts. When her mother stopped going to the factory towards the end of the war so as not to leave her daughter alone, she was threatened with arrest by the Gestapo. The family fled to the father’s friend in Trpín. After the war, the father was offered the job of postmaster in Šternberk. He moved there alone at first, his mother and daughter followed him later. Eva studied for two years at the family school for women’s professions in Olomouc (Pöttingeum). She then worked as an accountant in a textile wholesaler in Šternberk until her retirement. In 1951, she married Karel Učík, a professional soldier who was expelled from the army in the 1950s. He was later restored to his rank. They raised two sons, Karel (1952) and Richard (1962). In 2024, at the time of filming, she was living in Šternberk.