Anna Hejdová

* 1926

  • "I remember it was - I know this one-hundred percent - after the war, there were Germans that had been causing harm, they kept them in a big farm building in Horka just outside the village, it was a short walk there. Nowadays it isn’t there anymore. And they locked those guys up there and our people used to go there. I know one came one time, but I don't know them, I can't tell you who it was or what, he came to pick us up to go to deal with the Germans there. And my brother said: 'You know what? Get on my back, I'm not going anywhere, I'm not going to beat anybody up, I've enjoyed my time already and I don't care one bit for what you want to do.' So he didn't go there at all."

  • "...they used to go there to work as well, as we were working, and there was a table and on it all these jigs, hammers, and messes like that. So we always put bread in there and the prisoners, as they came in, they would take it discreetly. And there was one gentleman there, Albrecht was his name, his son was an aviator - near Ostrava, there are these big inscriptions, who died there as a soldier, so he's the one whose son’s name is also written there. So his father was in that concentration camp too. So I knew him, I always slipped something in there and he would take it and go around the table so inconspicuously. And that was given to everybody. Whoever went, he would... But it had to be done discreetly, right."

  • "And back then, I can tell you exactly, we were all, what do you call it, on the edge. They came for him in the evening and it was just me and my mother at home because my father was no longer alive. And they were looking for him, only he wasn't at home, he was still young, so he had gone to Sedlicko, he had friends there. So I had to go with them by car to find my brother. But we went to one of his friends, he wasn't there, to another, he wasn't there as well, but he was with his girlfriend. And that's where they arrested him. So I remember that, and then my mother, she was worried ... like everybody, right. She cut some bread, locked the house, and ran, she wanted to give him a little piece of bread at least."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Kostelec na Hané, 15.12.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 03:18:42
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

My brother was imprisoned and my sister and I were forced to labour in the Reich

Anna Hejdová with her husband, wedding photo, 1949
Anna Hejdová with her husband, wedding photo, 1949
zdroj: Anna Hejdová’s personal archive

Anna Hejdová, née Polášková, was born on the 14th of February 1926 in Olomouc into the family of a former member of the Czechoslovak Legion and a train dispatcher Antonín Polášek and his wife Anna. Antonín Polášek went through the Russian front during World War I as a legionary, from where he returned under dramatic circumstances as late as 1920. When Anna was eight years old, Antonín died after a kidney operation. The family lived on a modest farm in Horka nad Moravou but their peaceful life was disrupted by the Second World War. In 1944, Anna‘s brother Miroslav was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned for allegedly lending permits to resistance fighters so they could get to the Sudetenland. Anna and her sister Emilie had to join the forced labour in the Reich the same year. Emilie went to Breslau, while Anna was sent to Wiener Neustadt, Austria, to work in a factory where German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes were manufactured. After the drastic bombing, the forced labourers were moved back to the Protectorate and Anna continued to work in the Nazi-occupied Sigmund factory in Lutín, where she among other things also assembled the wings and fuselages of German aircraft. The forced labourers worked there alongside internees whose relatives had fled the Protectorate, and there Anna Heydová met the father of Josef Albrecht, a colonel in memoriam, who was killed in England as an RAF pilot in 1940. After the war, Anna began to work in agriculture. In 1949, she married Jaromír Hejda, with whom she raised two children, Hana and Jaromír. In 2022, at the time of the recording, Anna Hejdová lived in the Home for the Elderly in Kostelec na Hané.