Alena Buchalová

* 1930

  • „Actually I did have a bit of problem, but not much, because I used to go to church. I sang in a church choir and I sang at funerals. I would go there and I believed in what I was doing. And the admin in the hospital, he would always say: ‚Do you need to go to that church, do you need to sing?‘ I told him: ‚Tonda, have an organ built in the Sokol gym hall and I‘ll go sing in the Sokol gym hall. I like the church music so I’ll go sing there.’ He would always tell me: ‘You’re one wicked lucky gal because you work so hard.’”

  • "During one of those holidays when I was there with my cousin, we were alone at home with uncle and that younger cousin. Auntie went to Rovečné to do some shopping and the Gestapo came. At first, someone called uncle on the phone but we did not know what was going on. Uncle started running around the house, he kept throwing guns and I don't know what else in bags and carried it to the garden and he threw it somewhere there. We were terrified, and then the Gestapo came, arrested him and took him away. I don't remember how many years he spent in the concentration camp, nor where he was imprisoned, that's what I don't know any more, and when he came back, he had weak nerves and one day, someone in the family told us that uncle hanged himself."

  • "That's when we were kids and we stood on the asphalt and stared down towards the village pump where they stood. The yaited. I don't remember whether cars arrived to picked them up or whether they walked to the railway station. But that's where they gathered, at the village pump. Bags, backpacks, they held their children by their hands, it was terrible. They didn't even know where they were going and they thought that they'd be back soon, they only took the bare necessities, they'd be back soon anyway, now, it was terrible."

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They thought that he would come back

Alena Buchalová in 1948
Alena Buchalová in 1948
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Alena Buchalová was born on the 23rd of July in 1930 in Boskovice as the only child of Kristýna and Jaroslav Konečný. She lived in the vicinity of the Jewish neighbourhood and in her childhood, she played with everyone regardless of their nationality or religion. In 1942, she witnessed the forced departure of the Jewish inhabitants of Boskovice. Her uncle, Stanislav Zána helped the resistance fighters in the Vysočina region. She herself witnessed his arrest by the Gestapo during her stay in Malé Tresné. After she finished the first five grades of basic school, she went to another school for four years but the last year, she and her schoolmates had to work in a former textile factory that produced coats for Germany which was undergoing severe bombing at that time. After the war, she attended the two-year secondary school, the Public Business School in Blansko where she had two Jewish classmates who had survived the Holocaust. She has kept in contact with Lizzy Schwarzer (Dysckievicz) who now lives in London for all their lives and visited each other several times. In 1949, she married Přemysl Buchal and in 1952, their son Přemysl was born. She worked as an accountant first in the Minerva company in Boskovice and later, until 1989, in the local hospital. For all her life, she has been a member of the church choir, of the Janáček choir and she played in an amateur theatre troupe. After her husband’s death, she has lived in her house in Boskovice along with her son’s family (2022).