Jitka Hochmanová

* 1938

  • “It turned out well for us. The house was wobbling with us because of the shock waves but it lasted standing and we stayed alive. But we left it at night because as we did not have a cellar, we spent bombing in a store room with a vault. I was in the corner of the room and my grandma and mum were standing over me. Aunt was holding a wooden, heavy door. The door always opened due to a shock wave, so she closed it again. And pieces of turf were scattered at the door after the air raid and after the bombs had fallen down in the garden. And our cherry tree, its trunk was like this, it was turned like this. We had to cut it down. A bomb fell down behind it.”

  • “They issued an order that we had to hand them in within three days. The weapons that had not been dug by Mr. Kučera. My mum woke up for a moment so aunt asked her where it had been buried. Well, and my uncle, her brother, worked for railway and he got to know that Gestapo was at our house, so he did not go there because his wife was expecting him at home. He lived completely elsewhere and fortunately the Germans did not know it. She told him: ‘Don´t you even think about going behind the church, Gestapo is there!‘ However, my uncle did not let his sisters down and he dressed like a woman and he helped my aunt to dig the weapons up. And my grandma and I took them to police station on a hay wagon. My uncle was a Czech officer so he knew what to remove from the weapons so that they did not function and you could not see it at first sight. So, he took some small parts out of them and he threw them from the train window somewhere while travelling and that was it. So, we handed them in as it had been ordered but they were of no use for them. Nevertheless, they probably worried about different issues because they only arrived in three days to check if they had been handed in. They found out that they had been, so they went away and we were watched but nothing else...”

  • “Well, and because my dad was arrested in August 1939, he had taken away enough weapons but he did not manage to take away all of them and so they stayed buried in our garden. And they were there until 1944 when it came to light because of a betrayal. And I also want to say that dad was arrested for something he did not do at all. That is for spreading of leaflets. It happened like this; he arrived from Tišnov at the Munitions Factory in the morning. He opened the door on the 24th of August 1939 and a piece of paper flew under his feet due to draught because a window had been opened. He picked it up, it was a leaflet and Gestapo was standing behind him so he was arrested for spreading of leaflets.”

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We should help people, we should not destroy them

Jitka Hofmanová with mother Josefa and grandmother Bohumila
Jitka Hofmanová with mother Josefa and grandmother Bohumila
zdroj: Osobní archiv pamětníka

Jitka Hochmanová was born on the 10th of June 1938 in Brno to a family of Oldřich and Josefa Kothbaeur. She was a long-expected child. However, the father enjoyed his daughter only for a short time. He joined the anti-Nazi resistance right after the establishment of The Protectorate and he was arrested in August 1939 (paradoxically, it was for spreading of leaflets which he did not probably take part in) and he never returned home. Her mother continued in initiated resistance activities after father had been arrested. Dramatic destiny of her family became the main topic of Jitka´s narration. Gestapo did not get to know about the fact that Oldřich´s main resistance activity lied in smuggling and distribution of weapons from Brno Munitions Factory until two years after his death at the end of 1944 when one of the members of legionary-armaments group did not stand the torture and gave away that the stolen weapons had been dug in Kothbauers´s garden. Finally, it was enough for Gestapo that little Jitka and her grandmother took the excavated weapons to a local police station. Jitka with her mother, grandmother and aunt Vilma dramatically experienced also bombing of Tišnov and the subsequent flight to a seclusion. They tried to cope with their experience after the war - however, both mother and grandmother suffered from consequent prolonged physical and mental problems. Jitka took care of them after the war as well as during her studies at grammar school. She worked in Wool Research Institute in Brno for thirty years and she met her husband Vlastimil Hochman there. She experienced disillusion concerning the beginnings of normalization with him and their little daughter Jitka. Their second daughter Pavla was born in 1974. Jitka´s husband died in the 1980s and so did her mother shortly after it. At that time, she was happy mainly about the Velvet Revolution and newly gained freedom. She afterwards started to work at the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University where she worked as an assistant - technician in the field of Inorganic Chemistry. She worked in The Moravian Museum from 2003 and she stayed there to 2010. She now (2020) lives alternatively in Brno and in Tišnov.