Kateřina Večeřová

* 1936

  • "My uncle bought two beautiful foals, they were the pride and joy of the village. All black, but one had a bald spot. We called one of them Vrána (Crow) and the other Kača (Kate), the one with the bald spot. He bought them, I don't know what year. They would learn to walk alongside older horses, but they didn't work yet. Now, the Russian military commander came and said he wanted our foals. The parish priest took him to the parsonage and tried to talk him out of it, saying that they were not yet fit to work. No, he said, he wanted to ride around in his carriage. So they got them. When he finally wore them all down, riding around the vicinity drunk all the time, he shot them and went to get some other horses, just not from us anymore."

  • "He was an Englishman and [my uncle] hid him in a barn where we used to go to collect eggs every day, go swinging on this chain swing, and we just went to that barn all the time. The man must have been awfully nervous about all of us going in there. We'd go in there to get straw, store something in there, and make a fodder mix for the poultry and the pigs in this machine. My uncle would bring him food and drinks secretly. He likely only came out at night, that's for sure; nobody knew, not even my mother. Eventually he managed to get him to safety. I don't know, likely to the partisans, who then sent him on. It was impossible to talk about it."

  • "My mother and I slept in the sitting room, and my uncle had a room past the kitchen. He had been to a farmers' meeting, and right after he went to bed, there was a banging on the kitchen window. My mother heard it, she opened it and said, 'What's going on?' [Neighbour] František Kovář said, 'Don't worry, Ms Jurková, that's me, Franta Kovář. I just need to speak with Miro.' She answered the door, a horde of Gestapo men and soldiers rushed in, turned my mother around, and had her walk through the line of soldiers to uncle's room. I was crying on one side, not allowed to go near her; one of them held me. They waited for him to get dressed, and then they arrested him. Then when they arrested [Wilhelm Prellberg], my mother could tell [my uncle] just by the hat he had on..."

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    Šumperk, 02.08.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 02:52:06
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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The day my uncle was arrested keeps coming back to me.

The witness in her youth, 1950s
The witness in her youth, 1950s
photo: Witness's archive

Kateřina Večeřová was born Kateřina Jurková in Dolní Studénky in the Šumperk district on 10 January 1936. Her parents, Karel and Kateřina, were farmers. Karel Jurka died of meningitis in 1940 and his younger brother Miroslav took over the family farm. He joined a resistance group in February 1945, but its activities were soon revealed. The gestapo arrested Miroslav Jurka and he was executed in Bratrušov together with 15 other men on 31 March 1945. The family did not learn of his fate until January 1946 when the remains of the executed resistance fighters were exhumed. After his death, his sister-in-law Kateřina Jurková took over the management of the farm. The witness experienced the liberation and the deportations of Germans from the Sudetenland. Following February 1948, the communists took the family’s farm away and the witness had to move with her mother and husband to Šumperk where she worked at a research institute testing fabrics and fibres all her life. She and her husband raised two daughters. Kateřina Večeřová lived in Šumperk in 2023.