Berta Jelínková

* 1933

  • "No, we didn't know where we were going at all. There were no radios, and my mother didn't read the newspapers, so we didn't know. It wasn't even written in the newspapers, and we didn't have a radio because there was no electricity anyway. We didn't know where in Bohemia we were going. It was a surprise to us when we saw that the Germans lived here, but they were already gone. They offered us houses, but my mom didn't want a house, and neither did my uncle and aunt. So we lived in Hazlov in a tenement house near the factory."

  • "We left in October 1947. They took us all to Orvșova, we were there, and from Orvșova they loaded us on a goods train. And we went here, to Bohemia. We stopped in Košice, where we each received three hundred crowns. As children, we went to the town and bought chocolates and candies there. When we arrived here, we were in a camp in Cheb, opposite the spinning mill where the camp was. They came in cars and took us to where we needed to go. We went to Hazlov because my mother was with her sister, who was with her husband and her family, so we worked in a spinning mill in Hazlov. We were there for a year and five months and then we moved to Cheb, where we also worked in a spinning mill. It used to be called 'Sajlerka'."

  • "The Germans came all the way to Božovice. They went from Oravice to Božovice and then further. But the Russian army was already there, so they retreated to Božovice. The shooting and fighting in Božovice lasted three weeks. The first night we were all at home hidden in the basement, and for the next few days as well. Our neighbour talked to some German officer who said that anyone who has somewhere to go should leave Božovice because it will be bad. Since they encircled the Germans, there was no other way from Božovice to Oravice, only this one, and the Russian troops encircled them so the Germans couldn't go back."

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    Cheb, 07.06.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:07:26
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We had no idea where we were going in Bohemia

Wedding photo of Berta Jelínková, Cheb, 1952
Wedding photo of Berta Jelínková, Cheb, 1952
zdroj: witness archive

Berta Jelínková, née Jakubovská, was born on April 13, 1933 in the village of Greoni in Banat, Romania. She grew up in nearby Božovice, where she first attended a German school and later a Romanian gymnasium during the Second World War. In Božovice, fierce fights took place between the Germans and the Soviets. Although both her parents came from Czech families, they spoke Romanian at home. In 1946, the witness‘s father died, so for the mother of four children, a challenging period arose in connection with the post-war misery and poverty, which the family decided to solve by moving to Bohemia. In the autumn of 1947, the witness‘s family and her other relatives travelled to Cheb as part of the transport of re-emigrants. They then spent a few days in a gathering camp for re-emigrants, from where they transferred them to Hazlov, where the family lived for almost a year and a half. When the witness was only fourteen years old, she started working in a spinning mill. After moving to Cheb, she ran into minor problems communicating in Czech, as she only rarely spoke Czech until then. She married in 1952 and worked in a worsted yarn spinning mill until her retirement in 1988. At the time of filming, the witness lived in Cheb (June 2022).