Jiřina Hloušková

* 1921

  • “Dad was dealing in coal and somebody turned him in. I still remember when the Germans stormed into Frenštát. Mom came home from the town. ´They imprisoned dad!´ I said: ´Christ Jesus, why?´ Mother replied: ´I don’t know.´ He was detained for a week and then they released him because they weren’t able prove anything to him. He came home and we continued working. Oh, how I remember those Germans! Whenever they came, we had to give them everything. They were coming to confiscate things. They were going from house to house and checking how much grain people had. They measured everything, assigned a portion to people, and the rest had to be surrendered to them. They came to us and we had a big nice painting of president Masaryk on the wall. A German entered the room and assessed how we were living there and then he looked around and asked if the man in the picture was ´Grossvater.´ Dad says yes, that was grandpa. But then Dad took off the painting immediately because if they had discovered that it was actually Masaryk, they would have shot him to death.”

  • “I was working in Vítkovice and I was returning from work. The shift ended at ten and then we waited for the train departure at eleven. As we rode in the train, in Lískovec they hanged two people from Benešov. They had done something, but on the whole they were innocent people, I would say. But that was what Germans were doing. They hanged them between Místek and Lískovec and we had to get off the train there at night at twelve o’clock and we took each other’s hands and we had to pass by the hanged men and look at them. They were hanging there and the place was only dimly lit by a lamp. The Germans wanted to scare us by that.”

  • “We were campaigning for the Unified Agricultural Cooperatives with Rosťa. We were visiting the village houses. Some people agreed with it, some did not, there were all kinds of people. We came to Hejda’s house. They were really poor, and there was even their grandma living with them, a poor woman, too. Rosťa explained it to them, what it would be like and what it involved. They were listening. As we were to leave, when he had already explained them everything, this old grandma knelt in front of Rosťa and said: ´Teacher, you are such a good man. Do not make my son get even poorer than he already is.´ I ran away. I told Rosťa that I would never go with him again and I would never do this again. He began explaining it to me, telling me that it would be fine. And it was. People in the cooperative were doing very well. This Mr. Hejda eventually worked as the cooperative’s chairman. He came to me and he even thanked me. As I said, it was a terribly difficult time.”

  • “We suffered a lot. In Vítkovice, the shelter where people were hiding was buried under debris. I, my friend, and the foreman have saved ourselves, but all the other people from the workshop died there. A bomb fell there, and it buried everyone in that shelter. The air raids were usually around eleven o’clock, and at the beginning we liked that. If there was an air raid, we would get out and go out in the street, there were houses and a meadow and free space behind them. The air raid would take a while and we would sit down and watch the airplanes flying. Then all of a sudden those houses began to fall down! The guy who was delivering material to us got killed there, and I and one more friend ran into the shelter. At that time, those airplanes began bombing all of a sudden. That was for the first time. We were sitting under a fence and there was a shelter and so we ran there, but the guy stayed there and it killed him.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Opava, 16.07.2014

    (audio)
    délka: 02:51:24
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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I know what it means to be hungry, and therefore I am grateful for everything today

Jiřina Hloušková
Jiřina Hloušková
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

  Jiřina Hloušková was born April 18, 1921 in Horní Bečva. Her parents were poor and as a child she was often hungry and she had to work hard. Before the war she dated a local German youth, who then fought on the eastern front. In 1942 she was sent to do forced labour in an arms factory in Berlin and subsequently to a factory in Dresden which produced stockings. Due to her mother‘s serious illness she was allowed to return home in 1943 and she then worked in the Vítkovice Ironworks until the end of the war. On August 29, 1944 she experienced the Allied bombing of the factory. When the war was over, she broke up with the young German man. After the war she moved to the village Svobodné Heřmanice, which had been previously settled by Germans. There she met the local teacher, Rostislav Hloušek, who had been a prisoner of war and served as a deacon of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church. They married in 1948 and both joined the Communist Party. During the period of collectivization of country farms they were campaigning in support of establishment of the Unified Agricultural Cooperatives. Mrs. Hloušková now lives in Opava.