Růžena Fučíková

* 1932

  • „And so we waited and waited, there was a crows here, in front of the town hall, an assembly point it was, and we were waiting for the Americans. And they were not coming and it was noon so I and Bóža said: ‚Let‘s go home.‘ And when we got to Táborka, we saw that from the direction of Opařany, from Tábor, there’s a plane approaching, but not along the road, across the fields. At Táborka, there were houses only on one side [of the road], on the other, there were fields. And above the fields, an airplane flew, tiny, beautiful, blue and white. It flew slowly, so slowly and quietly and I and Božka were so joyful! We saw an airplane, it was so beautiful, we had never seen anything like that. We an into the field and waved at the airplane frantically, we were so happy to see it. For us, it was a miracle. And the plane flew over us and even though it was slow, it was gone in a moment so we walked down from the field, that Božka will go home, I will go home. And on the road, there were some soldiers and they yelled at us: ‘Hurry, hurry, go home! Run and hide, run away! Do not go to the cellars, the Germans will pull you out and murder you! Run away! Hide somewhere!”

  • „But dad saw that some of the soldiers were sewing revolvers in their coat tails, in their coats, and they were supposed to hand their weapons over here at the town sqquare. But dad saw these sewing them in and they had not handed in their guns and hid it in our house behind some plank or so. And dad said: ‘We’re going back to Jestřebice. This is going to get bad here.‘ Mom had a pie in the oven, potato soap on the stove, we just left everything as it was and off we went. But the Matuškas did not join us because mom delivered Mrs. Matušková of a baby girl, her name was Zdenička. She lived only until the following day and the baby was stillborn. She was so beautiful, I saw it for the first time in my life, such a tiny baby, and she was dead. They put her in such a small box. And the Matuška family stayed back and we went back to Jestřebice but we returned about two hours later when we found that there was no fighting going on. In Táborka, they took on the eighth, neighbour’s boy, he was about seventeen, Bohouš was about seventeen years old. They locked him up in their armoured personnel carrier and they tried to squeeze some information from him. In German, obviously. And Bohouš pretended to be dumb, deaf. Because his father had a brother who was deaf and who lived in their house so Bohouš could lip-read, so he pretended that he couldn’t hear and he was locked in the APC until it got dark. And they kept him under guard. And then during the night, he managed to run away.”

  • „So we were there, our family, and then I saw Mrs. Kašparová, they shot her husband, and she was pregnant, very so. She was throwing up there, where she was leaning against one cottage and she was vomiting a lot, it must have been horrible for her. And then announcements came. The dads were on guard, they were checking where from more Germans could appear. They would say: ‘They shot Mr. Hodík, the teacher, they shot the doctor, they shot…, they shot…, they murdered the whole Di-Lotti family of Dr. Kálalová. It’s not possible, this. It was painful, horribly so. And we were there on the eighth and we were returning from Jestřebice on the 9th in the evening, across those fields again, through the back path. And we got home and the cottage was fine, from the outside. From the street, it was, all houses were, there were bullet holes everywhere but nothing was set on fire, there were just holes in the houses. One couldn’t go out to the street because they would get shot dead the very moment, anyone. They kept shooting people. Even looking out of the window was not possible. And again, parents stood guard during the night, there was less shooting but the shoot-outs continued. The shoot-outs went on. And when we opened, unlocked the door, the house was taken over by the soldiers, by Germans.”

  • „And we walked there and it was really bad but we did not know it. Because we thought that the Americans would come. And when we walked across a meadow, such a small meadow, and we walked into a field, the German soldiers started to shoot at us from the church tower. And at that time, there were many people shot to death, I and Božka left just in time. And those who did not wait, there was this airplane which flew from here, turned around above the Fučík’s house and started fire. They set the Fučík house on fire, and Herink’s house, and those folks in front of the town hall, they just fired at them and that’s how it started. And the German soldiers who were in the school, they took over the tower, four cardinal directions, and they shot at everyone in sight. And they had a good view of the Posvátný hill, in the fields here towards the back, and they could see them from a ringside seat. And when they started to shoot at us, the parents said, ‚Duck!’ and we lay down, there was rye, it was already ripe so it was quite high and folks from the whole street were hiding there.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Bernartice, 13.09.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 02:04:11
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Instead of the much desired freedom, there was just pain and devastation

Růžena Fučíková
Růžena Fučíková
zdroj: archív pamětnice

Růžena Fučíková, née Polesná, was born on the 10th of March in 1932 in Bernartice near Milevsko. The story of her life follows the story of the South Bohemian town of Bernartice which was considerably touched by the events of the WWII. When she was ten years old, she witnessed the arrest of the Krzný family whose son Rudolf left to fight against the Nazis abroad after Czechoslovakia was annexed by the German Reich. Along with him, two of his friends left, Rudolf Hrubec and Jan Doubek. Their families and other inhabitants of Bernartice were arrested and interrrogated by the Gestapo in Klatovy for helping the Intransitiv paratrooper group. The whole tragedy ended in executions of 23 Bernartiece inhabitants and many others were deported to concentration camps. On the 12th of July in !1942, only two days after the razing of Lidice, Bernartice was encircled by the German army and it was meant to meet the same end as Lidice and Ležáky had. The Nazis called off the order to raze Bernartice to the ground at the last minute. Other tragic events followed with the end of the WWII. Bernartice was expected to be liberated by the US army and as such, it became an aim of rabid shooting rampage from the retreating Germans. Růžena Fučíková was 13 years old and as well as the majority of the Bernartice inhabitants, she was in immediate danger. She witnessed many a personal tragedy but also of great acts of courage and self-sacrifice. On the 8th of May of 1945, 31 inhabitans from Bernartice and nearby settlements perished. Among the victims, there was the family of the local physician, Dr. Vlasta Kálalová-DiLotti. Růžena Polesná married Antonín Fučík at the beginning of the 1950’s but from the start of their marriage, they had to deal with further issues. They repaired the Fučík family house which burned down on the 8th of May of 1945, after the Communist coup d’état, their business was nationalised and Růžena had to start working in the agricultural co-op to repay an imaginary debt for the field the family had owned. In 2021, Růžena Fučíková lived with her family in Bernartice.